On [Mon May 19 18:21], Richard Matthew McCutchen wrote: > On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 16:54 -0400, Ben Stern wrote: > > On Mon, May 19, 2008 at 08:59:13AM -0400, Peter Teuben wrote: > > > I apoligize for being unclear, but in my message I meant > > > that I don't have a boot device, not the media. Sony's > > > used to be special, but some websites seem to describe > > > booting from a generic USB cdrom with a special lilo/grub > > > flag. > > > > Allegedly, a boot USB thumb drive might be a winner here. > > > > There are several Windows mechanisms for building such a device (even for > > Linux), and some Linux mechanisms - Slackware, for example, will make a > > bootable USB thumb drive, and I'm sure that other distros can too. > > > > Note that this requires USB, > > Let me amplify that to: support for *booting* from USB. My friend has a > computer with USB, but it couldn't seem to boot from my thumb drive.
agreed. Booting from such USB devices is a relatively new thing. Only if you can find that option in your BIOS boot devices, the place where you specify the order of boot devices to look for, will it be able. I've got a thinkpad, they've supported this for a wihle. My old T40 even does it. This sony laptop doesn't have it as an option. They do say 'optical drive', but i think they mean the special sony drive, i hooked a USB cd on it today, and with that ide2=.... trick somebody mentioned earlier it didn't seem to do anything good. Mind you, I only get the bad lilo from the current HD and although I do see a message that the CD is recognized ,the essense of my problem is that the boot does not switch to that CD and so the boot fails the old way and I'm still back to the disassembly problem. (the disassembly didn't fare much better, i'm not able to remove a component which a website claims should be removed and i don't want to damage it) peter
