[BL] Linux without a hard drive, was Re: MPlayer

sindi keesan keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
Tue Jun 28 15:48:30 EDT 2005


On Tue, 28 Jun 2005, sindi keesan wrote:

> We are trying to find a use for a 500MHz laptop Compaq Armada M700 with
> 320MB RAM but no hard drive or caddy for it.  We got it to boot by
> unplugging and replugging CMOS battery.  To get it to power off and on,
> plug and unplug the power cable and make sure there is no battery in the
> battery slot (the large battery).
>>
>>> sindi keesan wrote:
>>>
>>>> The computer appears to be booting properly now, so we are back to
>>>> the problem of how to use it without a hard drive after booting
>>>> from floppy disk.  Can we, while it is turned on, remove the floppy
>>>> drive so as to insert the DVD-ROM drive?  We could then run linux
>>>> from a parport zip drive, booted from floppy disk with grub, and
>>>> play DVDs.
>>>
>>> Usually, single drive bays in laptops are hot-swappable.

I found a review which said this multi-drive is hotswap.


I tried to boot with the zip-drive boot disk that David made (imm) but it 
gets stuck every time just after Checking for popad bug...OK (the next 
line should be POSIX conformance testing).

BL3 2-floppy set won't boot - error 0x10

BL2 2-floppy booted and I could insmod loop parport parport_pc scsi_mod 
sd-mod and imm, chroot to the zip drive after mounting fs.img on it on a 
loop, and run mplayer from there, slowly (but I have to set up sound for 
this cmoputer).  It is rather a slow way to go about this.

DSL might be slightly faster but I would have to su and then insmod imm 
and then chroot.


keesan at sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org



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