Boot problems from external CD on Dell Latitude D400

Hi,

trying to rescue some data for a friend from a banjaxed Dell PC which was running WinXP Pro. It is a work PC and I am trying to get some files off quickly prior to the laptop being sent back to IT support.

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List of some things I can't do which might fix stuff:

boot from floppy (BIOS settings are password locked and only look at CD and HD).
Repair WinXP Pro (don't have the admin password).
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Using the Knoppix ISO V3.3 [16-02-2004]

I have the (apparently well known) problem that the CD bootstraps O.K. (using BIOS?) but then drops back to a restricted shell when trying to find the filestore for the full boot (no CD driver in Knoppix).

I have looked for ways of fixing it, but no luck so far.

I note that the CD uses 'el torito' to boot; now I can boot the latest version of FreeDOS, again using 'el torito', but unfortunately can't see the XP Pro NTFS hard drive.

So 'el torito' should work (a previous version of FreeDOS with an earlier 'el torito' didn't).

I can also see references to drivers from Dell for MSDOS use of the CD, but haven't so far found any Linux drivers.

I have tried various cheat codes without luck.

I have seen solutions which rely on installing the ISO on the HD (using another O/S) and adding stuff there - but I can't get to the HD because I don't have a bootable O/S.

So:

can anyone point me to a CD driver for Linux for the external drive(s) on the Dell Latitude D400?

I guess I would then have to repackage the CD to include this driver and also guess that the instructions are on this site somewhere :-)

Any help much appreciated.

Cheers
Dave R

Smart Boot Manager will let you boot the CD's which can't be booted because of el'torito booting issues. It's usually older drives, like on my 99 laptop which have issues with the larger boot images on the Openmosix kernels for example.
the fact that your machine bootstraps, and gets started, means that the cd drive sees the disk.
sounds odd,


also, Austrumi linux lets you change the XP admin password, it's got an ntpass startup.
www.distrowatch.lcom
It's a mini distro.


edit:
Not many pc's allow a person to boot from a USB drive... so..