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Topic: Help with Toshiba Tecra 510DCT and no CDROM

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Grogley

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Oct. 2006

Posted: Oct. 18 2006,12:22

Hi All,

I am new the Linux world and tried DSL on an old emachines system that loaded and worked in minutes, after spending days and days and failing with larger Linux distributions. DSL is amazing.

Now I want to get my acient laptop running DSL so I can use it to web surf with it while I watch the tube. It is a 133MHz Pentium with 144 Mbytes of ram, 2 or 6 Gbytes of disk (two drives that I swap between, one running Win98 and the other running Win NT4.0), floppy but no working CDROM drive. That is the problem it seems. I have PCMCIA slots that work though.

Here is what I have tried.

I made a boot floppy and tried a Poorman install after copying the CDROM contents to the C: drive of the laptop. When the floppy boots, it never finds the KNOPPIX file (yes it is in CAPS). Will DSL know what to do with the NTFS partition on WIN NT?

So then I tried copying the CD contents to a CF flash card and used with a PCMCIA adapter and then tried the "bootpcmcia" boot option. Again, it never finds the KNOPPIX file.

I am not sure what to try from here. Is there a way to install from a network drive?

Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Rod (AKA Grogley)

^thehatsrule^ Offline

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Posts: 3275
Joined: July 2006

Posted: Oct. 18 2006,18:27

Quote

Will DSL know what to do with the NTFS partition on WIN NT?

DSL can read ntfs partitions, but I do not think those would be searched.

On your fat drive, do you have it in X:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX ?

Grogley

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Oct. 2006

Posted: Oct. 18 2006,20:12

Thanks for the reply,

Unfortunately, I am unable to copy the CDROM contents to the Win98 system because for some reason the OS refuses to enable the PCMCIA subsystem. So, my network card won't work and my CF reader is useless. The only way that I can think of to get the files over there is to create a ZIP floppy archive that spans many floppies. I stopped trying that after realizing that it would require many more floppies than I had laying around.

Only the Win NT system has network capabilites. I am about to give up unless there is someway to get the install to recognize the CF card in the PCMCIA slot.

The NT machine does have two partitions on the HD, so theoretically, I could blow away the second partition and reformat it as FAT32. I hesitate doing this because once I do this, the NT capabilities of this machine will be comprimised and since there is no CDROM drive, it will forever be done with NT as an option.

Thanks again.

^thehatsrule^ Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 3275
Joined: July 2006

Posted: Oct. 18 2006,22:29

Can't some ZIP floppies carry 100mb each? DSL uses a 50mb base.

I suppose you *could* try booting from the NTFS one:
try booting with fromhd=/dev/hda1

There are some floppy alternatives - check out the wiki, and search for "floppy install".

Grogley

Group: Members
Posts: 10
Joined: Oct. 2006

Posted: Oct. 19 2006,14:38

I have no Zip drive so that is out.

I tried installing to /dev/hda1 but that failed too.

My last try (for now anyway os to set up a Pt-2-Pt RAS like connection through a serial cable between it and my main system and then copy the files to the Win98 FAT. It has been a while since I have done this so I am not sure if it will work. We'll see.

Thanks.

Rod

5 replies since Oct. 18 2006,12:22

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