my laptop dosent have a cdrom drive

[bigmoose]

Just looking for an update on how it went.

Good?

Bad

Ugly

~ryan

[bamarob]

I haven't received my laptop drive adapter yet. I'll keep you posted.

BR

[bamarob]

I got the laptop drive adapter yesterday. When I got home last night, I pulled the HD out of the laptop and started to plug the adapter in. I had to bend one pin down to make it work. I opened my PC case up, unplugged the master drive and plugged the laptop drive in. I inserted an 11-19-2003 Knoppix CD and did a soft reset. Nothing happened. After several tries, I tried a hard reset and it recognized the new drive and booted to a knoppix: prompt. From there, I booted with "knoppix lang=us 2". I couldn't find 'knx-hdinstall', so I used 'knoppix-install'. I partitioned the drive w/ a 256 MB swap and 2.9 GB EXT3 partition and started the installation. The installation went fine and it wrote LILO to the MBR. I then rebooted the PC. X failed to start, but I got a login: prompt and logged in as root. Did a 'df -h' and it showed 2.1 GB used and 800 MB free.

I then shut the PC down and reinstalled the drive in the laptop. Fired it up. And,.......

NOTHING!

Apparently the drive controller in the laptop is bad. When I power it on, I hear it access the floppy and the CD, but it doesn't seem to access the HD at all. It was getting late, so I shut it down and went to bed. I think I have the boot order set to floppy-CD-HD. I may fiddle with that tonight to make it hit the HD first.

Does anyone know if I can replace the HD controller in this laptop (Compaq Presario 1245)? If it's part of the motherboard, I'm probably out of luck.

Thanks for all the help, bigmoose.

Later,

BR

[bamarob]

Just an update...

When I boot the laptop, I get:

LILO 22.5.x (can't remember the exact version number)
Loading Linux..........................................
BIOS Data Check Successful

Then a blank screen and nothing else.

When I try booting with a Knoppix boot floppy, I get lots of:

hda lost interupt

Perhaps I've just got some IRQ problems????

Thinking that it may be a hardware problem with the IDE controller, I did some checking. Turns out, the IDE controller is integrated in the motherboard (not surprising for a laptop). I found a source for a replacement motherboard, but they wanted $700+ for it!!! Me thinks I may have to give up on this little project.

I found several working systems and parts boxes on eBay. I may bid on some of that stuff and see if I can come out with a working laptop.


BR

[jwilds73]

Hello I'm reading this thread with much interest. I recent got a Dell Latitude XP 4100CX from a friend to toy around with. It to lacks a cd drive and I have never had a laptop so this is my first. I downloaded and ran Blueflops Linux on my laptop so far. While I dont have a ethernet card in it as of yet to see if blueflops can get online. I have a modem card but I dont have dialup service From reading these other posts I assume I can get a HD adapter put the HD from my Laptop in my main computer then boot the Knoppix CD run the install program onto the laptops HD then after that's complete reinstall the HD to the laptop then boot it and configure it? I have done one other Knoppix install on a old gateway 133mhz desktop system and it runs fine though slow. This is very exciting for me so any info you can provide will be great.

Anyways on another note it has win95b and I am going to try and buy a ethernet card and get it online with win95 for now. I think I can make a image of the current OS onto my main computer so that if I mess anything up I can just copy the whole old OS back onto it.

[bigmoose]

Just an update...

When I boot the laptop, I get:

LILO 22.5.x (can't remember the exact version number)
Loading Linux..........................................
BIOS Data Check Successful

Then a blank screen and nothing else.

When I try booting with a Knoppix boot floppy, I get lots of:

hda lost interupt

Perhaps I've just got some IRQ problems????

Thinking that it may be a hardware problem with the IDE controller, I did some checking. Turns out, the IDE controller is integrated in the motherboard (not surprising for a laptop). I found a source for a replacement motherboard, but they wanted $700+ for it!!! Me thinks I may have to give up on this little project.

I found several working systems and parts boxes on eBay. I may bid on some of that stuff and see if I can come out with a working laptop.


BR

I've never had to bend a pin at all. Sometimes it is very hard to figure out pin 1 on laptop drives, but usually it is on the outter edge away from the set of 4 pins. And remember to line up pin 1 of the ide cable. Also did you put it back in the laptop correctly? I'm not insulting you by asking these questions but I always ask myself when I do this stuff.

your boot string should be
knoppix 2 dma .... that way it puts it in text mode and doesn't try to configure the x server. knx-hdinstall should be there.

If you still have an x-windows problem stay in text mode .... run apt-get update then apt-get upgrade ... then run xf86config and configure your xwindows components.


email me if you have any more probs. I got your last email but haven't had a chance to respond to it.

~ryan

[bamarob]

bigmoose,

For some reason, this laptop HD had a single hole filled right in the center. I had to bend a pin down out of the way to get it to work. That wasn't a problem. The install went flawlessly on my desktop. When I re-installed the drive in my laptop, I get the results described above. It acts as if there's something wrong with the MBR, except it boots fine to a console from the MBR of that drive when it's in the desktop. You can see that it's hitting the MBR in the laptop, or I wouldn't be getting

LILO 22.5.x
Loading Linux............................
BIOS Data Check Successful

It's like when it starts to access the primary partition, it hangs with a blank screen.

Thanks for all the help. I'm about ready to give up on it unless I can get a deal on a parts machine on ebay.

Later,

BamaRob