[Cialug] "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"

[Brandon Griffis]

When you boot with the CD in the drive does the bios boot pause as though
it's reading the disk before going on the the windows splash screen?  If not
it sounds like it's not even trying to spin up the disk as a boot device, if
that is the case (that it's not even spinning up the disk) it wouldn't be
that it's designed to skip it for being linux (as it couldn't know that
linux is on the disk).

You could also test (if you have one) a windows boot CD.  Just to make sure
it'll boot a CD at all.

Also, I would try pressing escape during the memory check of the bios boot.
Also try f12.  Hopefully your bios supports boot device menu selection and
one of those keys is usually the default to pull up the menu.  That way you
can manually select the CD as your boot device right at boot time.

If it has a floppy you could also make a boot floppy to load the CD and see
if that works.

I highly doubt that they could/would make a bios restrictive on what kind of
OS it can boot from CD.  If they did several utility disks would also not
work.  As well as things like PC-Dos (for Symantec Ghost).

Hope you can get it sorted out.

-G

On 2/24/07, Rachel Garrett <rmgarrett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
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