[Cialug] "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"

[Rachel Garrett]

Hi,

I'm new here, so how better to introduce myself than a plea for help?

I bought a used Gateway laptop that came with Microsoft XP Pro,
intending to put Linux on it. But it refuses to boot from CD-ROM, so
I'm stuck. I tried a Knoppix CD and a Gentoo CD; neither of them work.
It just goes straight into Windows. Both CDs have successfully booted
in other machines, and this laptop reads other CDs just fine. So it's
not an issue with nonbootable CDs or nonfunctional hardware.

In the BIOS setup screen, the first boot device listed is CD-ROM. I've
played around with arranging the order of boot devices, and it hasn't
helped. Quick boot (skips some tests) and quiet boot (hides the boot
information) were enabled by default, and I tried disabling them. I
thought maybe one of the tests it skips on a quick boot might lead it
to forget to look for bootable media. But that didn't work either.

I have a little sticker on my laptop that says "Designed for Windows
XP," but I thought that was just a generic statement saying, "Hello,
I'm hardware that works with Windows." Now I'm worried that it's
really saying, "Nyeah, I have annoying little safeguards that keep you
from installing anything but Windows." Is this common practice on
machines that come with Windows pre-installed? If so, can anyone point
me to some instructions on how to work around this? I have a USB
drive, but it's full of data from my old machine, so I don't think
even Damn Small Linux would fit on it.

Thanks,
Rachel