See my previous reply to R P's note, that was all the
problem was as he pointed out, the boot disk was the
quick fix.
FYI folks, the Toshiba Portege 7010 seems to make a
fine LINUX box, once I got around the boot, it sucked
up everything, and only got a complaint on the audio
drivers (seems I get that on all Toshiba boxes) which
is of no import as the device is going to be used as
a black box file server for sales demos.
The sales person will arrive on site with a case with
two PC's in it, one of them will have the field and
dispatch pieces (I wanted to have them on separate
machines, but that puts us to 3 machines and until we
get things on a PDA we will just share the field and
dispatch side on one machine for demo reasons, makes
it easier to show anyhow when you are using a projector
all you do is switch from dispatch to field screens)
By way the field and dispatch machines are windows and
the file server is UNIX or in this case LINUX.
The previous demo system was two laptops (field and
dispatch) and a Tadpole (that was a $10K nightmare just
looking for some place to mess up, one did it to me
over in Germany, there are a bazillion fans in that
little box and if one stops turning the box halts or
will not boot, in this case one way deep down inside
this little bugger of a nightmare had quit turning due
to a bit of packing material having settled between
the blade and the fan case, and to make things worse
the error code is not even remotelly "human readable"
it was just a number, anyhow when we finally found out
what it was we had to tear the thing apart, guess what
you need special tools to get inside, there, getting
to see why we want to move this whole thing to laptops?
Anyhow, we and our german reps and one of our guys
over here (I called him about 2 am) with his reading
some obscure code list we figured out it was a fan
then the german guys started going through auto tool
bags (thank God for german cars and their tool bags
that come as part of the car kit) anyhow we found
something that worked well enough to turn something
down deep in side this turkey and get it open, found
the silly bit of crap that had the whole thing stopped
I took a dentist tooth pick out of my tools and pulled
the trash from between the fan case and blade, we put
it all back together ( all of the safeties had to be
closed or it would not boot) and fired it up.
By this time people have realized that the Tadpole
was NOT a good field piece for rapid recovery from
a mess like this. Finally we are getting rid of the
things and getting down to real world working systems.
Hey do not laugh that little system with the server
running on the little laptop could be a dispatch system
for a mom and pop operation... Now to get the field
and dispatch sides moved to LINUX...
By way one neat thing about that Portege 7010, is that
all we do is plug power into it and connect it with
the lan that links it to the other machines we do not
even open it up, just turn it on wait until disk activity
stops and then access it from over the LAN. So you have
this flat thing about the size of a note pad setting
somewhere with two wires coming out of it, soon with
wireless LAN that will be reduced to power only (batteries
are shot, but big deal, I can build a big gel battery
that will power the thing for hours on end if so needed)
Comments below...
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ben Ostrowsky [mailto:ostrowb@tblc.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 30, 2002 09:18 AM
> To: SLUG
> Subject: Re: [SLUG] Will not boot from CD
>
>
> > Any ideas beyond doing the install with a boot disk?
>
> No, but in the spirit of your flight instructor, let me
> clarify and you
> tell me if I'm accurate:
Will do, I learned a LONG time ago that there are no dumb
questions...
>
> Bootable Windows CD in drive, cold boot. Result: boots from CD.
Yep....
> Bootable Red Hat CD in drive, cold boot. Result: boots from
> hard drive.
Correct....
>
> Have you tried other bootable Linux CDs just to see whether
> they'll boot
> on your laptop? Debian, Mandrake, etc. I'd especially recommend
> LNX-BBC[1], since it's designed to be used in dire circumstances.
>
I have a SuSE and a Mandrake around here also something else and
they all have the same problem... I have to do the same thing with
them all, create a bootable FD...
> What OS does the laptop currently use?
That one had Win2k on it, but got the same thing with any OS,
in fact Even with LINUX on the HD... It was as R P said, the
Tosh Bios can not see a bootable 2.88 MB floppy image, so you
have to do the 1.44 fd and boot it from there, then things
proceeded well, too well, it was scary how well they went...
> Perhaps some newer MS OS has an
> unfortunate issue with booting Linux install CDs, so sorry,
> no idea how that happened? (Anything's possible...)
>
I would love to put this one to MS feet, but they were
just innocent bystanders until I got LINUX booted then
they were kind of like those poor people over in the
Ukraine at that airshow, one whack of that LINUX CD and
the MS bits were gone.
Y'all enjoy and thanks again for the info... By way even
if it does not hit the target, a lot of times info does
explain other issues, or make me think about something,
so if there are no dumb questions there are NO dumb answers,
they may not always be the right one for that particular
scenario, but believe me I have learned more from the added
info than you can know.
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