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Laptop dual boot running WinXP and RedHat 9.0

H

HKSturboKID

Golden Member
Hello guys....

For the past 2 days, I've been playing with my old laptop which has WinXP and Redhat 9 dualboot using Grub as a boot loader. Providing the I've been using main XP and was on and off trying to learn Linux. I've decided to give linux a try again. The Red Hat 9 that is running on it is very stable. I was able to manage to do a apt-get update and apt-get upgrade to download all the files. Also install mplayer, firefox and other im programs. Since most of the stuff I did is under gui, I don't think I've learn much. Well right now I want to wipe the Redhat out and probably install Suse 9.1 or the Ubuntu Linux that was posted. I've a Toshiba p3 500 laptop with 512mb and a 20gb harddrive with about 8gb free space currently occupied by Red hat 9.

Now to the problem. Whenever I put the bootable CD in the drive, it doesn't boot to the CD it goes straight to Grub boot loader and ask me if I want to load Linux or Windows. If I select either one, it start that OS. For some reason, I can't even get to the bios. on Bootup, it said to press f2 to go to setup and its not working. It just goes right to Grub after the memory check. Does anyone know of another way around this?

Thanks.
 
Press F2 alot? Or maybe del?

I just press the button alot instead of just when it prompts it to. LCD displays are slow to react sometimes and you can miss things that would normally show up on a CRT display.

Weird.

Otherwise you can try a boot floppy to get to the cdrom, some Linux installers still have support for that, although many don't provide it.

Grub has a built in command line mode were you can type in boot instructions in case you mess up a config or whatnot....

But cdrom images have their own particular setup involving compressed filing systems and isolinux boot proccess. I don't know enough to give you instructions, it's probably possible, but I wouldn't know what to do...
 
As always, Thanks Drag for the quick response.

Well the problem with the laptop is that the floppy and cdrom is swapable. Its either or, and can't be use at the same time. If I was able to boot to floppy, how do I do the fixmbr thingy when I can't even get to the Windows Repair console. 🙁 As for pressing F2, I've press it the minute I power the laptop on and tap it so many times before the grup info shows up and its still don't work. I'll try to play with it some more and see what happens. But as far as the hardware goes, do you guys think it can handle Suse 9.1 or the Ubuntu Linux?

P3-500, 512mb ram, 20gb HD with 9gb available for linux.

Thanks.
 
Well the problem isn't the bootloader. It's your BIOS. The bios chooses first what boot device it's suppose to use, and it chooses the harddrive before the cdrom.

If you can get it to boot from the cdrom fine, if you can't it won't matter what you have on the harddrive; NTLDR or Grub.

One thing you can try is to reset the BIOS. Usually nowadays it's set by default to boot off of the harddrive first, then the cdrom. On laptops the cmos reset is usually on the bottom with a little hole you press a pen into, like a calculator reset. Maybe you'd get lucky and the bios is set to boot off of the cdrom by default when reset.

Otherwise, maybe the cdrom your using is fubar'd and isn't realy bootable? Try it on your desktop and make sure that its bootable?

If you want to install Suse I think you can use boot floppies to start the netinstall and it will download all the install media from ftp servers just as long as you have a workable internet connection. I know you can do this with Debian....

Otherwise if you want to jsut upgrade your Redhat install, you can change your apt-get sources to use Fedora Core2 and do a "apt-get update" then a "apt-get dist-upgrade" and upgrade your OS to Fedora that way. It's not the recommended method, there are certain things that are done thru anaconda installer-based upgrade, but for the most part it works.
 
Drag...thanks again for your help.


Otherwise if you want to jsut upgrade your Redhat install, you can change your apt-get sources to use Fedora Core2 and do a "apt-get update" then a "apt-get dist-upgrade" and upgrade your OS to Fedora that way. It's not the recommended method, there are certain things that are done thru anaconda installer-based upgrade, but for the most part it works.


How do I change the source to point to Fedora Core2? When I did the apt-get install, they supply me with a file to dump into the apt directory, therefore I don't have to point to any source.

Thanks.
 
the atp-get sources is that /etc/apt/sources.list file.


see:
http://www.fedora.us/wiki/FedoraHOWTO

Sometims you would have a /etc/apt/sources.d directory (don't remember the exact name of the directory. It contains some plain text files that would have what you'd normally just stick in /etc/apt/sources.list file.

If your using a third party depository they probably have fedora sources. If you need help just show me what you have in your /etc/apt directory and the contents of your sources.list file.

Note that this is NOT the recommended way of upgrading. It's best to do it with a install cd-based upgrade. But since this is how you do it properly with Debian, and apt-get is from Debian, it works. (usually.)

There would be a few things in the changeover that would be awkward. Such that Fedora doesn't use XFree86, it uses X.org instead. And there will probably be a couple things that break annoyingly, and you'll have a couple dependancie headaches.

If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Then your back to were you started with trying to coax your computer to boot off of a cdrom. But it should work, I've done it before.

I went from:
Redhat 8 to Redhat 9 to Fedora Core 2 with apt-get and a combination of freshrpms and official fedora sources on my PVR machine (originally my parents "second" computer)
 
Thanks Drag,

Doing the update right now with the new source using apt-get. downloading over 600 packages with ETA of 4 hours. 🙂

I'll report back once it finish and if its still working.

Thanks again.
 
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