Laptop Install on Compaq 1620

Forum: Laptops
Topic: Laptop Install on Compaq 1620
started by: Dante

Posted by Dante on May 21 2004,00:32

Mornin' folks. Seeing as I am very new to linux in general, I thought I'd post the issue here. I've been looking for a copy of Linux to run on my old Compaq Presario 1620 laptop. It has 32meg ram, 166mmx pentium processor, and a 2gb HD. The floppy drive's heads are misaligned, and is pretty much useless. The CD-ROM drive does work, but whenever I try to load DSL on it, it gets to trying to load X, then just crashes out. I'm getting constant I/O errors, and have tried 2 separate cd burns on it. I also get a very funky screen when it tries to boot X. I get the cursor, but the color on the screen is almost white. All this, and then DSL just dies, and pops up the I/o errors, and says "296 Bus error fluxbox". I'm at a loss here. I'd love to do a HD install, seeing as I think the CD drive is about to die, but I won't be able to get it on without the CD. I do have an external CD drive, but it's USB, and the system will not boot from USB. Any help would be appreciated.

Posted by cbagger01 on May 21 2004,03:48

Sometimes you can use a floppy drive with misaligned heads to load files from floppy disks that are formatted and created using the bad disk drive itself.

These floppys will be unusable on other computers but can be read on the original drive itself.

If you can get your floppy to read it's own formatted disks, then you should do the following:

Boot up in your original os and make a boot floppy using the instructions provided at the web site. Then copy the contents of the DSL CDROM \KNOPPIX folder over to your C:\KNOPPIX folder.

Then try to boot from floppy and do not insert the DSL CDROM into the CD drive.

Good Luck.

Posted by skaos on May 21 2004,10:13

Your CD-drive may be ok, I have a Compaq 1520 (P133) which has some "interesting" screen colours (and many people in this forum have reported similar problems). You could try to experiment with different resolutions and colour depths to see if that makes any difference. And have you tried both fbdev and Xvesa X-servers?