Re: Weird used computer

From: CJT (abujlehc_at_prodigy.net)
Date: 05/16/04 

Date: Sun, 16 May 2004 18:43:42 GMT

Allan Adler wrote:

> Allan Adler <ara@nestle.csail.mit.edu> writes:
>
>
>>Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I'm having the necessary keyboard,
>>mouse and monitor sent to me.
>
>
> They have arrived and I've put the computer together. The computer,
> an HP Pavilion with a Celeron processor, originally had Windows XP
> on it but the vendor wiped the hard drive clean since he didn't feel
> he had the right to sell the machine with the Windows XP that the original
> owner had installed. I didn't mind, since I intended to install Linux on it
> anyway. As soon as I put the machine together, I put the Linux installation
> CD in the CDROM drive (actually, a CDRW) and tried to boot. To my surprise,
> the machine would not boot from the CDROM drive and there was nothing like
> the usual message on bootup telling me to hit DEL to go into setup, where
> I might have been able to explicitly tell it to boot from the CDROM drive.
>
> I did manage to install RedHat 7.2 on the machine in the following way:
> I had an old Win95 bootable floppy and managed to boot the machine from
> that. It detected the CDROM drive and told me it was drive k:. I changed
> to k: and changed directory to dosutils and then executed
>
> loadlin autoboot\vmlinuz initrd=autoboot\initrd.img
>
> whereupon it started the installation from the CDROM and that ran
> to completion. So, now there is one hard drive with Linux on it,
> one floppy drive and one CDRW that I can't boot from. It boots ok
> from the hard drive.
>
> I'm under the impression that if I want to be able to boot from the
> CDROM, and I do since that will make it easier to do emergency repairs
> on the system, I have to modify the BIOS. I have no idea how to do that,
> particularly under Linux. Also, I don't like it that I don't get the
> option of doing setup with DEL or F2 on bootup. How do I change that?

Try F1 

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