CD won't boot on a laptop with 96 MB RAM

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muggins · #41 Post by **muggins** » Fri 01 Sep 2006, 10:03

another experiment worth trying is to install sbm(smart boot manager) into your mbr. i've often used it to boot cdroms where bios doesn't even register cdrom drive.

Smart BootManager supports booting from almost all kinds of IDE ATAPI CD-ROM, including PCMCIA CD-ROMs. You can let BIOS boot from C: only and assign a password for it, then you can boot from CD-ROM with Smart BootManager easily, while other guy couldn't. If you have a Laptop computer with a special PCMCIA CD-ROM which BIOS does not support booting from, Smart BootManager can help you make it easy!

http://btmgr.webframe.org/

it's only small download, and if you want to get rid of it, typing

Code: Select all

fdisk /mbr

from a dos bootdisk will restore your mbr.

siherts · #42 Post by **siherts** » Fri 01 Sep 2006, 12:13

Dear all

I've spent an hour browsing the HP site and found this.

There was a faulty batch of Toshiba CD roms, this could be causing all the problems.

I've just spent 30 mins on the phone to HP and finally spoke to someone sensible who is going to investigate and call me back.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed.....

Will keep you posted.

Regards, Simon

marksouth2000 · #43 Post by **marksouth2000** » Fri 01 Sep 2006, 19:14

My advice: take the advice Muggins gave you. It works.

I've just done exactly that with SBM on a portable that allows either the CD or the floppy drive to be installed. Insert floppy drive, boot from SBM floppy, install SBM to MBR of hard disk. Shutdown. Remove floppy drive. Insert CD drive with Puppy CD. Boot up. When the SBM screen appears, select CD and away you go. (NOTE: you may have to go through the SBM menu to get it to scan for CD drives. It depends.)

IMPORTANT: if you install Puppy (or anything) to the hard disk afterwards, make sure to install its bootloader to the root of the install partition, and not to the MBR, or you will overwrite SBM and no longer be able to boot from the CD.

pmshah · #44 Post by **pmshah** » Sat 02 Sep 2006, 02:01

Most boot managers depend on the bios to boot the cd rom - handing over the control to the bios to boot the next device. If you are having problems booting to a cd rom SBM may not be able to help.

I believe SBM has the ability to be installed to a floppy drive. So if you have access to both the floppy disk & cd at the same time I suggest you install it to floppy & test it out before disturbing your MBR. Uninstalling sbm could be a bit dicey.

There is a floppy boot image available that has the code to boot from a cd rom on mobos that do not have this option availbale in the bios. You might want to try that out too.

muggins · #45 Post by **muggins** » Sat 02 Sep 2006, 04:05

mark posted:

IMPORTANT: if you install Puppy (or anything) to the hard disk afterwards, make sure to install its bootloader to the root of the install partition, and not to the MBR, or you will overwrite SBM and no longer be able to boot from the CD.

see this link where you can have grub on mbr, then have an entry to boot cdrom's using sbm & memdisk:

http://www.murga.org/%7Epuppy/viewtopic.php?t=4038

you can also use sbootmgr.dsk, with memdisk.bin from syslinux, to enable cdrom booting with grub:-

title cdrom
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/grub/memdisk.bin
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/grub/sbootmgr.dsk

pmshah says:

Uninstalling sbm could be a bit dicey.

i've tried lots of different boot managers and have never had any problems with sbm, or in uninstalling it from mbr. it's as simple as:
fdisk /mbr from a dos boot prompt.

but, as the romans say, caveat emptor.

pmshah · #46 Post by **pmshah** » Sat 02 Sep 2006, 12:46

SBM is supposed to offer a lot of options. One of the very unique ones is ability to select your boot option based on time of the day or date. Would be very handy for all those torrent seeders admins. I simply wish that the installation & configuration was a whole lot more user friendly.

I tried it twice but was frustrated. A simple fdisk /mbr did not work. It kept popping up the very cryptic boot partition selection interface. You try to install any version of windows on the same hdd & you lose all your carefully setup selection criterions. One might even panic not seeing other partitions at all. Of course you could save it to a floppy but I haven't used a floppy in any machine in almost 4 years now.

Last time I tried to install Suse 10.1 it did not inform me that lilo option was available at a later stage nor did it offer to install grub to the root partition. It almost wiped out my entire hard disk. Thanks to BootITNG - my preferred boot manager - I was able to recover all the more than 9 Linux & 5 Windows Primary partitions.

muggins · #47 Post by **muggins** » Sat 02 Sep 2006, 13:41

9 Linux & 5 Windows Primary partitions.

sorry pmshah,

i stand corrected. i've never had such a complex installation.

Sage · #48 Post by **Sage** » Sat 02 Sep 2006, 13:48

This topic is going around in circles. I told you to find out who made the drive, and ezeze and muggins already had identified it as a drive issue. You may be able to flash some new FW, but the best advice still occurs right back at the beginning, on p.1. Some of us do really know what we are about, you know!

marksouth2000 · #49 Post by **marksouth2000** » Sat 02 Sep 2006, 16:33

Sage wrote this:

Sage wrote:Some of us do really know what we are about, you know!

...immediately after this exchange:

muggins wrote:
9 Linux & 5 Windows Primary partitions.
sorry pmshah, i stand corrected. i've never had such a complex installation.

Very few people have such a complex installation! Especially since one can have a maximum of 4 primary partitions on a PC, and if one has more than 4 partitions then one of those is unavailable, beinng taken up with holding the contents of the extended partitions.

So perhaps Sage should have said:

Some of us may possibly know something of what we might be about, you may possibly suspect.

pmshah · #50 Post by **pmshah** » Sun 03 Sep 2006, 05:03

siherts wrote:I burnt another Puppy CD at 2x, it works fine on my desktop but exactly the same problem on the laptop.

Maybe I need to take a deep breath and create a swop partition....I will have to think about this carefully or just live with Win 98.

thank you all for your help and advice

Sim1on

If at all I would worry about it on the desktop & not on the laptop unless you have a bad battery pack.

Unless you have a single C: partition taking up the entire hdd space you need only resize one of the logical drives to create a blank space for a swap drive, without disturbing anything else. Download gparted boot iso (30 mb download) to format/resize this as linux swap. I guess you should be fine. You could also use Partition Magic for the purpose.

I have seen WinXPPro run on AMD-K6 500 with 64 mb ram, why not Puppy?

pmshah · #51 Post by **pmshah** » Sun 03 Sep 2006, 05:14

marksouth2000 wrote:Sage wrote this:
Sage wrote:Some of us do really know what we are about, you know!
...immediately after this exchange:
muggins wrote:
9 Linux & 5 Windows Primary partitions.
sorry pmshah, i stand corrected. i've never had such a complex installation.
Very few people have such a complex installation! Especially since one can have a maximum of 4 primary partitions on a PC, and if one has more than 4 partitions then one of those is unavailable, beinng taken up with holding the contents of the extended partitions.
So perhaps Sage should have said:
Some of us may possibly know something of what we might be about, you may possibly suspect.

In this case I suggest you do visit www.terabyteunlimited.com & read up on their "Boot IT NG" Boot & Parition manager.

BootIt

#52 Post by **Flash** » Sun 03 Sep 2006, 14:03

pmshah, are you familiar with Ranish partition manager? Boot It sounds very similar.

pmshah · #53 Post by **pmshah** » Mon 04 Sep 2006, 03:18

Flash wrote:pmshah, are you familiar with Ranish partition manager? Boot It sounds very similar.

Am not familiar with the current version. The last time I tried it - about four years ago - it was not even close. Just visited the Ranish site. Seems like it has picked up a few pointers from BootItNG.

There are a couple of advantages to BootItNG which may or may not be present in Ranish. In the event of a non booting partition I can always make it visible under another boot option to recover data allowing full access. These partitions always take drive letters following the original allocation. Same holds true for the additional drives attached to the same or other ide channel. Supports booting from any partition on any external or internal drive. Will allow preselection & booting of any partition from any windows partition with bootnow.

The current version being 1.77 & free upgrades being available up to version 1.99 I figure still have about 2 to 3 years of free updates still available to me.

marksouth2000 · #54 Post by **marksouth2000** » Mon 04 Sep 2006, 06:59

pmshah wrote:In this case I suggest you do visit www.terabyteunlimited.com & read up on their "Boot IT NG" Boot & Parition manager.

I referred only to your claim to have, what?, 14 primary partitions on your PC. That's not possible, regardless of what bootit can do.

pmshah · #55 Post by **pmshah** » Mon 04 Sep 2006, 19:26

Your ignorance shows. The fact that you will not even visit the site to verify my statement.

Unfortunately I do not have a digital camera handy otherwise I would send you the image of my partition manager & boot option screen.

It definitely is not worth my while to educate people wrapped in their egos. So I will leave it at that. You are RIGHT.

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