Puppy on 98 toshiba laptop 9? mb ram

[toomuchcomputertime]

I am trying to get puppy going on my brother's Toshiba (335CDS) laptop.

However, I cannot find the bios, it will not boot to any puppy cds, and so far boot floppies have not been working.

Any recommendations? Currently the computer runs win 98 with something like 98 mb of ram.

Thanks for your help, he is getting tired of windows

[Shel]

I am trying to get puppy going on my brother's Toshiba laptop.

However, I cannot find the bios, it will not boot to any puppy cds, and so far boot floppies have not been working.

Any recommendations? Currently the computer runs win 98 with something like 98 mb of ram.

Thanks for your help, he is getting tired of windows

A trick I've used to get into the BIOS on random machines is to remove a drive; that usually gets the machine to display a BIOS setup screen. However, with machines of the late 90s, it's possible that the don't have automatic drive detection, so you might have the risk of not being able to re-set-up the drive when you replace it.

I have seen machines where the only way to get to any sort of set-up screen is to boot from a special floppy, or run a special program, however.

I have no specific knowledge of old Toshibas either way.

What's the model number of that laptop? Maybe someone on the forum knows how to get into the BIOS.

-Shel

[toomuchcomputertime]

The laptop is a Toshiba 335CDS,

Thanks

[tempestuous]

I cannot find the bios, it will not boot to any puppy cds

Maybe someone on the forum knows how to get into the BIOS.

Doesn't anyone use Google? It took 30 seconds to find this -
http://michaelminn.com/linux/toshiba335/
Esc key.

[toomuchcomputertime]

yes, I use Google, I found it about 3 minutes after the last post, however, it still is not booting from the floppy disk, and won't recognize the CD.

Thanks

[hillside]

What have you been using as a boot floppy? Would it be worth trying a different one?

I've had good luck with Smart Boot Manager.

[Libretto100ct]

I have the same series of Toshiba laptops. You are not going to get it to boot from the CD or Wake up floppy. What you need to do is pull the HDD,and put it in another laptop or use a Desktop to laptop adapter (a few bucks off eBay).

Use Gparted to format the HDD. That is unless you want to keep windows. Set one partition up as Ext2 as whatever size you want. Set up another partition as SWAP for 2.5x the amount of RAM you have.

Use the universal installer to install Puppy & Grub.

Put back in your Toshiba laptop and answer the prompts for video, keyboard and mouse. You are good to go.

Takes all of 10 +/- minutes if you are familiar with Puppy.

If you need further specific help before trying, let me know.

[toomuchcomputertime]

Thanks for the suggestions, I have been using the wake pup2 boot floppy. I should not wipe Windows because my brother is not quite ready for that...

If we get desperate though I the suggestion on putting the hard drive in another computer sounds good.

Thanks.

[sindi]

ESC-F1 setup. Change PCIC setting from automatic to non-cardbus (and don't try to use with cardbus cards). This change fixed DSL and basiclinux but I still cannot boot from live CD: "ldm_validate_partition_table(): Disk read failed". Puppy 4.3.0.
I tried loadlin with Puppy 4.2 and
it got stuck trying to load the kernel (from a FAT32 partition).
Our floppy drive reads disks that were formatted on the same computer, and we can boot from CD. Do you know how to clean floppy or CD drives?

64MB is not really enough for Puppy anyway. Works nicely with basiclinux and minimally with DSL.

[toomuchcomputertime]

Thanks, But...

I don't have that computer anymore. Hopefuly your post will help someone else though.