Peter Teuben wrote:
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
Hi Peter,
You can try the super grub disk (http://www.supergrubdisk.org/). I
had used the CDROM version of it earlier. It can usually detect your
installed OS's and provide you with a grub menu using which you can boot
into the OS you want. This works even if your MBR is damaged.
A USB image and a floppy image of this bootable system are also
available. Since you mentioned that your system does not recognize a USB
drive during boot, you will probably need to use a floppy drive
(possibly external USB floppy drive).
Additional information can be obtained from this website (especially
the last two links):
http://www.supergrubdisk.org/wiki/SGD_Howto_Boot
HTH.
