[Cialug] "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"

[Dan Hockey]

 Run defrag first before resizing a partition, or you'll find yourself
reinstalling windows after you've finished your linux install.
If you have something like partition magic(pm7 or better) create an empty
unformatted partition large enough to hold linux.
 Reboot and make sure windows doesn't freak out over the change.
Then look for www.ultimatebootcd.com they have a floppy version as well, use
the floppy version when you have a computer that can't(or won't) boot from
cd.
 Most linux distro's should be able to find the empty partition during the
partition setup. Select install to empty partition and let the installer do
it thing. This may seem like a lot of steps to go through, but this is a way
that works when setting up a dual boot win/linux on an older computer.
-dh 

-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On Behalf
Of Rachel Garrett
Sent: Saturday, February 24, 2007 10:45 PM
To: cialug at cialug.org
Subject: [Cialug] "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"

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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