How to boot from disk

[rwcitek]

Thanks for the advice although I tried burning at 4 x speed on 2 different burners using a variety of disks. Still nothing is happening just although this time round a bios screen is displaying "inbootable device" thanks anyway I will download a full version of linux and install it on the hdd.

At work we are having similar issues but more extreme with a Dell Latitude L400 and an external CD-ROM drive. Knoppix won't boot, nor will some Windows CDs. However, if we go into the BIOS, select "restore factory defaults", make the CD-ROM the first boot device, and then reboot, everything works ... for a little while, sometimes. Our suspicions are that this is a hardware problem: the BIOS version, the CMOS battery, the mobo, the CD-ROM, the CD-ROM cable, or something we haven't thought of.

In short, your problem sounds similar to ours, which means that I suspect faulty hardware.

BTW, you did burn the ISO as an image and not as a file, correct? See: http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Download...o_be_burned.3F

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/

[pestie]

I'll just point out here that every single time I've run into a system that won't boot from a CD-ROM drive, it's because the CD-ROM has to be a master on one of the IDE channels. It can be a master on the secondary channel, that's fine, but with many systems, running a CD-ROM drive as a slave is the kiss of death for CD booting.

As for booting from a floppy, one approach I've used in the past is to boot a (MS|Free)DOS disk with CD-ROM drivers on it and use a copy of loadlin to boot Knoppix. The only catch is that you have to type all the boot parameters and cheat codes by hand, including the ones you don't usually see (they're in /KNOPPIX/boot/isolinux.cfg on the CD), and sometimes that exceeds the DOS command-line length limitation. But it'll do in a pinch, like when I need to boot Knoppix on my old P166 laptop that's incapable of booting from CD.

[rwcitek]

As for booting from a floppy, one approach I've used in the past is to boot a (MS|Free)DOS disk with CD-ROM drivers on it and use a copy of loadlin to boot Knoppix.

That sounds cool. Care to write this up as a HOW-TO and post it?

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/

[pestie]

I guess I should, huh? This is at least the second time I've answered this question here, and I hardly ever come to this forum. Maybe sometime soon I'll throw together specific instructions in the form of a HOWTO.

[rwcitek]

Maybe sometime soon I'll throw together specific instructions in the form of a HOWTO.

It doesn't even need to be polished. Just a quick-and-dirty list of things would be great to start with. Details can be filled in later.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/