Lee Turner wrote:
Hi allI'm having difficulties installing Debian on my Toshiba.. it won't boot from CD (no surprise it's an old beast) but when I boot from floppy, it initially wouldn't detect the external cd rom drive (connected via a pcmcia card) after tweaking a bios setting it seems now to detect the cd cdrive but on doing so it ejects the cd and the drive refuses to close!This results in the error message 'Unable to mount CD Drive, perhaps the CD is not inserted"I have also tried using DSL to get some form of base install of Linux then working from there, but with similar errors - even using a Floppy/USB Stick combo to no avail.A friend of mine is going to give me a loan of an ethernet card on Monday that may allow me to do a net install (only card I have is a wireless one that I think requires ndiswrappers) but I fear that may still fail and I'll be back to the original problem.I'm at the end of my teather with this, does anyone have any suggestions? Cheers Lee
Hi Lee,I've never had any luck installing Debian from anything other than floppies on my Portege 3015 either... the 3015 is the same as the 3010, it just had more software installed by default back when it was new.
None of the Debian installers have ever been happy with any of the USB-based CD-ROM drives I tried for that machine that has no built-in CD-ROM. But I shouldn't say that today: I haven't tried Sarge's installer.
I was able to install RH9 a long time ago on it using just a single floppy and their CD using a USB CD-ROM drive, so I know there's no reason it can't be done. Fedora broke all that. At one point the RedHat to Debian instructions pre-Sarge would have worked nicely, load RH and then flip the machine over to Debian, if the switch could all be done in the confines of the 6GB hard disk.
The person that suggested Knoppix forgot that you can't boot from CD.I've also managed to bust a couple of keys off of the keyboard and replacement keyboards are worth more than the whole machine is worth nowadays, unfortunately, on the Toshiba parts market.
It's still a great little machine. It was an "ultra-portable" laptop long before such things even truly existed. And the screen quality while not super-high res was EXCELLENT.
I've been thinking about turning it into a car computer of some sort -- play the music collection, etc. If it got stolen it's not worth much.
Let us know if you get it going -- I may try out Sarge's installer on it again and see if it's happy with it.
Nate