Okay, I've now tried the normal rescue disk, the tecra boot disk, the low mem bootdisk, and some tomsrtbt disk. this last one was the most successful, allowing me to load up 'something' enough to make the boot disk(which works in other computers), but which still crashes my laptop. They all seem to fail during a probe for either IDE or SCSI hardware, I can't really tell. Is there a way to bypass some of the hardware testing which seems to restart my computer?
thanx, The World Emperor >Okay, >Well, I was already booting from floppies, and still the computer restarts >shortly after recognizing the hard drive. I'm just now trying to install >Debian, so how do I make sure it's Linux bootable? The hard drive is >formatted for DOS and generally empty. Thanks for helping me, > Well, i have an old laptop too, which boots up from the rescue disk. if i understand correctly, then you have only one partition on your hard disk, namely a DOS one, and you're using the boot floppy that you made for your desktop PC. if this is the case, i would try the following: make the rescure disk from resc1440tecra, which is the recommended rescue for laptops. This is different then using the regular boot disk made for a PC with linux installed, since in the latter case, the kernel will try to load the root file system from the hard disk, in your case it does not exists. Now if you already tried it and still it doesnt work, there is a nice Laptop-HOWTO in www.snafu.de/~wehe/Laptop-HOWTO.html where you can see if you're hardware was checked for linux compatability. HTH, Danny. ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com