Mailing List Archive: Problem booting older laptop

Problem booting older laptop

Feb 7, 2008, 11:39 AM

Post #1 of 3 (2301 views)

I don't know if this is even the proper place for my issue, but since
the boot floppies that I have downloaded are syslinux based.

I have a 97 vintage Hitachi laptop, and it won't boot newer CDs. It
will, however, boot a Debian 2.1 CD. As we know, that version is quite
old, and it booted off the second CD, not the first.

What I want/need to know, is there a reasonable way for a complete
newbie to this sort of thing to build a bootable CD with a newer
kernel, etc.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

--
Later,

Lonnie
Mostly Debian, but now
I'm messing around with
Gentoo. Humm, I kind of
like it too.

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Re: Problem booting older laptop [ In reply to ]

hpa at zytor

Feb 7, 2008, 1:28 PM

Post #2 of 3 (2166 views)

Permalink

Lonnie Mullenix wrote:
> I don't know if this is even the proper place for my issue, but since
> the boot floppies that I have downloaded are syslinux based.
>
> I have a 97 vintage Hitachi laptop, and it won't boot newer CDs. It
> will, however, boot a Debian 2.1 CD. As we know, that version is quite
> old, and it booted off the second CD, not the first.
>
> What I want/need to know, is there a reasonable way for a complete
> newbie to this sort of thing to build a bootable CD with a newer
> kernel, etc.
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide.
>

Your laptop has a broken implementation of the El Torito specification
common in the late 90's; specifically, it only supports the floppy
emulation mode, not the native mode (which ISOLINUX uses.)

The problem with this is that the floppy emulation mode is limited to
2880K, which is limiting by now.

Your best bet is probably Smart Boot Manager:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

-hpa

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Re: Problem booting older laptop [ In reply to ]

gen2 at scicable

Feb 9, 2008, 12:06 PM

Post #3 of 3 (2162 views)

Permalink

On Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:28:49 -0800
"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com> wrote:

> Lonnie Mullenix wrote:
> > I don't know if this is even the proper place for my issue, but
> > since the boot floppies that I have downloaded are syslinux based.
> >
> > I have a 97 vintage Hitachi laptop, and it won't boot newer CDs. It
> > will, however, boot a Debian 2.1 CD. As we know, that version is
> > quite old, and it booted off the second CD, not the first.
> >
> > What I want/need to know, is there a reasonable way for a complete
> > newbie to this sort of thing to build a bootable CD with a newer
> > kernel, etc.
> >
> > Thanks for any help you can provide.
> >
>
> Your laptop has a broken implementation of the El Torito
> specification common in the late 90's; specifically, it only supports
> the floppy emulation mode, not the native mode (which ISOLINUX uses.)
>
> The problem with this is that the floppy emulation mode is limited to
> 2880K, which is limiting by now.
>
> Your best bet is probably Smart Boot Manager:
>
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/
>
> -hpa
>
I certainly thank you for that link. However, I could not get it to
compile and install correctly on my Gentoo Intel 2ghz system. I did
grab the needed packages that they called for, but no joy.

So, I installed NetBSD. The laptop seemed OK with those boot floppies
and since I had an old 1.4G drive laying around, I am now playing with
NetBSD.

Lonnie

--
Later,

Lonnie
Mostly Debian, but now
I'm messing around with
Gentoo. Humm, I kind of
like it too.

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