How to format hd? or other help?

Booting, installing, newbie
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pooklaroux
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Joined: Wed 15 Mar 2006, 07:09
Location: Columbus, Ohio

How to format hd? or other help?

#1 Post by pooklaroux »

Okay, I have the laptop. We recycled a fat32 6G drive from an old mp3 player, but we can't get puppy to load from cd. I may not have enough ram to load 1.0.8 in entirety (it appears one of the 64 Mb memory cards is bad) This system has no floppy, so I can't use the wakepup floppy I already made.

In desperation. I turned to the old win98 startup disks, but they don't want to load either.

I find I don't have any old pc utilities anymore, and certainly not any ms dos install disks. I think what I need to do is make partitions, format and reinstall dos. Or maybe my live puppy cd is still unfriendly -- I am still worried that since I am making these cd's with a mac they are not truly pc friendly.

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Flash
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#2 Post by Flash »

Yeah, if the CD won't boot at all then your problem isn't with the partitions on the hard drive. But if the Windows installation disk won't boot, then the problem may be in the hardware, or the BIOS. Exactly what happens when you try to boot the Windows CD? How far does it get before it stops? Does the same thing happen when you try to boot the Puppy CD?

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pooklaroux
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Location: Columbus, Ohio

#3 Post by pooklaroux »

Although the 600 is *supposed* to be able to boot from the cd -- it does EXACTLY the same thing the test system did -- it wants a boot floppy. Alas, it does not have a floppy drive. (the test system is a pent I "frankenputer" 119/66 with 144M ram, 16G hd. put together by my husband a few years ago so I could reformat my hd mp3 player in fat32, classic mac os will not do this. Interestingly enough it is that very hd which is in the laptop now...shows you how much we recycle hardware in this household. NOTHING goes to waste if we can help it. )

I still think the problem with booting puppy is with the disks I burned -- I used Toast, I used the ISO 9660 setting, and I turned off apple extensions, and used only CD-ROM format, with msdos naming. But still I think that somehow the fact I burned them on a mac is screwing up the boot thing. If I can get the 600 going, I'll buy a cdrw module for it, and then I won't have this problem again.

Well, i may have solved the problem temporarily. I do have a copy of SuSE 7.0 on cd, so I threw that in there -- and it booted and started setup with no problemo -- it's running now. Probably will take all night. Oh -- and while running some diagnostics from the bios I found out that it's a pent II, running at 300mhz. better than I expected. It also means I still have 128M after taking out the one 64M ram module that I think is wonky.

I do not know if SuSE 7.0 has any usb support, or networking capacity, or whether it will support my pcmcia cards. But it is a start. On the not so great side, now it has lilo in there, which I understand is not so cooperative with puppy.

Make no mistake, I want to use puppy -- I really think that puppy will give me the best use of the system. But I gotta start somewhere getting this ol laptop up and running.

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pooklaroux
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#4 Post by pooklaroux »

I suppose I should say: when I used the win98 starup disk, it booted, and loaded a generic cd driver into a virtual a: drive on ram, went through scandisk, told me it was copying files to my hd, then said it couldn't start windows and exited to an a: prompt. I changed directories, looked at c: and at D; and decided it didn't actually copy any files to my hard drive, and in any case I couldn't run windows from the hd or the disk, no matter what command I tried I could run starup, and startup would run scandisk -- I did that about six times. the win98 disk has fdisk on it, but since I don't have any ms-dos install disks, I didn't want to partition the drive, and then not be able to format it or do anything else with it.

Frankly I was happy to let the suze installer partition and format the drive for me this time around. It made three partitions, including a swap partition. Been a long time since I've had to partition or format a pc drive, and I was feeling a bit udgy about it.

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