Puppy CD wont boot in Toshiba laptop

[RonG]

I burned a spanking new disk with puppy, and it wont boot to my laptop.
It's a Toshiba Tecra530CDT, with 64mb of ram, intel pentium processor, with mmx. It tries to boot Ubuntu, the install screen comes up, but doesnt have enough ram to do it. It will even try to boot Windows XP, but again doesnt have enough ram to run it, but it wont even attempt to boot the puppy disk. Anyone got any ideas ?

Thanks, Ron

[01micko]

I burned a spanking new disk with puppy, and it wont boot to my laptop.
It's a Toshiba Tecra530CDT, with 64mb of ram, intel pentium processor, with mmx. It tries to boot Ubuntu, the install screen comes up, but doesnt have enough ram to do it. It will even try to boot Windows XP, but again doesnt have enough ram to run it, but it wont even attempt to boot the puppy disk. Anyone got any ideas ?

Thanks, Ron

Did you do an md5sum check from a console on the .iso? Windows has an equivalent but I'm not sure what it is. This just checks the integrity of your file compared to a number which is available from the download source.

[rjbrewer]

Hello RonG

Can you test the cd on another comp. to see if it's a good burn?

Does it reach the initial boot screen?

rjb

[pa_mcclamrock]

Do you have a swap partition on your hard drive? Puppy won't fit into 64 MB of RAM, but they say it will work with 64 MB RAM plus a swap partition.

David McClamrock

[01micko]

Do you have a swap partition on your hard drive? Puppy won't fit into 64 MB of RAM, but they say it will work with 64 MB RAM plus a swap partition.

David McClamrock

G'day David,
I'm aiming to get that down to 32.

Anyways if Ron has a good disc he should at least boot to a console. I can boot to a console with 16meg and no swap.

So Ron, if it boots at all, and you are feeling adventurous and you can handle the cli, try 'puppy pfix=nox' at boot.

[RonG]

The disk is good. I always burn and boot on my main machine to make sure the burn was good. At the moment, the Toshiba has no operating system on it. That is why I wanted to install Puppy on it. As I stated, a disk with Ubuntu 8.04 will go to the install screen, and attempt to load the kernel, then realizes it doesn't have enough memory to install. The same happens when I put a windows XP disk in. It goes to the install screen, and then give the message that there isn't enough memory on this machine to install.
When I use the Puppy disk all I get is the "invalid system disk, please remove and reboot".
It has me puzzled. I am running out of ideas. This thing had Windows 98 on it when I got it, but unfortunately, it came with no Windows disk. I bought it some time ago off of ebay.
Well thank for at least trying, and the replies.

Ron

[RonG]

I am sending this on Puppy,from my Virtualbox that is set up on my main machine, so there is no doubt that the disk works. I am thinking about just chucking the laptop into the trash bin. It has frustrated me enough for the last while. I think the only way I could ever get it to work is with a 98 disk, and I don't have one, or know anyone who does, so I think I am check mated.

Ron

[rjbrewer]

RonG

Down load a copy of "Dariks boot and Nuke"; do a quick erase or
auto nuke. This will give you a fresh hard drive to attempt
another puppy install .

rjb

[RonG]

RonG

Down load a copy of "Dariks boot and Nuke"; do a quick erase or
auto nuke. This will give you a fresh hard drive to attempt
another puppy install .

rjb

Well I downloaded it, tried it, same result. "Invalid system disk, please remove and reboot."
Seems only the two factory disk I have tried will boot. Nothing I burn has even come close, yet they all boot on my main machine. Maybe I need to burn at a slower rate ?


Ron

[rjbrewer]

Are you saying "boot and nuke' wouldn't work either?

[RonG]

Are you saying "boot and nuke' wouldn't work either?

Thats right. No disk I burn will boot, only the factory disk I listed earlier. Ubuntu 8.04, and Windows XP . They both go to their respective boot screens before informing me of what I already knew, that there is insuffecient memory to run either of them.

Ron

[rjbrewer]

RonG

A few other things to try:
If you can get into bios settings reset to default.
Replace the little cmos battery on the motherboard.
Pull out and reinsert memory card.
Remove hard drive and test in another laptop or pc with adapter.

This assumes your comfortable with partial disassembly of a laptop.

Keep the "boot and nuke" cd away from your main pc, children,
or small animals.LOL

[RonG]

RonG

A few other things to try:
If you can get into bios settings reset to default.
Replace the little cmos battery on the motherboard.
Pull out and reinsert memory card.
Remove hard drive and test in another laptop or pc with adapter.

This assumes your comfortable with partial disassembly of a laptop.

Keep the "boot and nuke" cd away from your main pc, children,
or small animals.LOL

I am comfortable with tearing anything up, and putting it back together. lol I go inside all my pc's once in a while just so they know who is boss! I can manage to get into the bios OK, as far as the rest, I am very close to giving up as this thing is taking too much of my time. All I really wanted to do was get an operating system on it so I can donate it to a project we have around here to try and get a pc in the hands of any and all children that want one. Maybe I should donate it to a kid any way, they would no doubt have it running in 5 minutes, lol. Thanks for all the attempts to help everyone, but I think this thing is past any help.

Ron

[rcrsn51]

It sounds like your old optical drive is able to read commercially pressed CD's but can't read a home-burned disk. But with 64 MB of memory, you should be able to get it going. The conventional strategy on units like this is to remove the hard drive and connect it to a working machine via a USB adaptor. You can then do a full install with a swap partition.

Assuming you want to invest in an adaptor, you might want to look at a low-memory version of Puppy, like this 2.02 Puplet.

[Ron G]

It sounds like your old optical drive is able to read commercially pressed CD's but can't read a home-burned disk. But with 64 MB of memory, you should be able to get it going. The conventional strategy on units like this is to remove the hard drive and connect it to a working machine via a USB adaptor. You can then do a full install with a swap partition.

Assuming you want to invest in an adaptor, you might want to look at a low-memory version of Puppy, like this 2.02 Puplet.

I don't know if I want to invest any more time, let alone money in this hunk of junk. lol
I burned a copy of the puplet just in case something changes in the near future. For now I feel like walking away from it for a bit, and waiting until I have the energy to take another run at it. I have so many boxes of junk, I need to spend some time going through it all because I know I used to have an old copy of Win 98 somewhere in the pile, but I keep thinking I tossed it way back when. Who knew I may need it some day ? Well thanks for all the help fellow Linuxer's. Is that a word ?

Ron

[ieee488]

I wouldn't be surprised that your laptop's CD drive is having problems reading burned CDs. I have that trouble with my Toshiba 2065CDS. Give it one more try and burn at slow speed.

[justme]

I agree with the above...burn at a very slow speed to a cd-r....it may be that the drive is only 8x or something and will not read +r and rw..just a thought..


TECRA 530CDT Product Specifications
Modular CD-ROM: Toshiba XM-1502B
5.25

[ieee488]

Yep, burn only to CD-R. CD-RW just won't cut for that old of a PC.

[RonG]

[quote="justme"]I agree with the above...burn at a very slow speed to a cd-r....it may be that the drive is only 8x or something and will not read +r and rw..just a thought..


TECRA 530CDT Product Specifications
Modular CD-ROM: Toshiba XM-1502B
5.25

[Gizzo]

I've just installed Puppy 4.1.2 on my old Tecra 730xcdt. It has 80 meg ram, a Pentium 1 processor (150MHz) a 2 gig hard drive, which I partitioned to give 300 meg swap space.

The BIOS doesn't provide the facility to boot from CD, so I use a Smart Boot Manager floppy to facilitate this.

A couple of things I found:

1. When I burn the live CD using a hp / compaq nc6320 it is not recognised by my Tecra, but when I burn it with my Toshiba Qosmio the CD is recognised by my Tecra.

2. When I boot the Tecra using the live CD I have to use the boot parameters:

puppy pnpbios=off acpi=off

otherwise it hangs and does not complete. I have added these boot options to the grub config file menu.lst, as it still won't boot the HD install without them.

Hope this helps.