[Novalug] Hardware : Compaq Presario 1700 -- goofed up?

[Roger W. Broseus]

I have a similar laptop and gave up after trying 3-4 distros, including
Puppy, slimmed-down Ubuntus (xubuntu), etc. My supposition is that the
more recent distros are leaving out stuff that used to work on older PCs.
I did have an older version of SuSE running dual boot w/ Win-98 on it at
one time . . . ver 9.x, as I recall (did not try sled, etc.). I had to use
a PCMCIA card to get network access. Of course the modem did not work. For
what it's worth: I had supplemented the base level of memory on the
machine so memory was not the problem. But, it was slowwwwwwwwww. Oh, a
network install of Debian also bombed.

Like I said: I gave up and this was after beating it to death. I believe
you'll need the optional boot parameter noapci (sp?) for this old dog . .
. and pray to a number of greater and lesser gods.
-- 
Roger W. Broseus

>
>  	I have a friend to whom I've long bragged that linux runs
> better on old small slow machines that Windows. Now I have his
> old laptop on my desk, trying to put linux on it for him,
> replacing W2K.
>
>  	When I eventually got it to boot from media, the first
> FC6 install disk told me way early that I didn't have much
> memory, and it would have to start swapping right away; I told it
> OK to that. When it got to Grub, I told it to go ahead and put
> that in the MBR. First mistake right there, maybe.
>
>  	Shortly after that, I got some sort of error messages
> which I didn't understand, except that it ended by saying it was
> aborting the install.
>
>  	Trying again, it tries to boot to W2K; but halfway
> through that, I get a long error message about "inaccessible boot
> device." That tells me to run CHKDSK /F (after doing hardware
> things that're Greek to me), but doesn't seem to have a prompt.
>
>  	It doesn't even try to start booting FC6, Ubuntu, nor
> Knoppix afaict.
>
>  	Is this machine toast, or can it be salvaged?
>
>
> --
> Beartooth Bookworm, Reading Intensely
> I'm not either absent-minded! I'm single-minded.
> There's a difference.
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