Red Hat 7.3 & Toshiba Tecra 8100

[Duane Attaway]

On Mon, 17 Jun 2002, Mark Hutchings wrote:

> I have a client that needs Red Hat 7.3 installed onto his laptop. Toshiba
> Tecra 8100.  It wont boot off the burnt CD, tho it does boot off a Windows
> XP CD.  I downloaded the RH7.3 ISO again, and burnt it to a blue-back
> CDR.  Still wouldnt boot off the CD.  I cant boot off of a floppy cause
> his laptop came with a USB floppy drive.  Anyone have this problem before
> and/or know of a fix?  His laptop has a DVD player, not a plain CD-Rom.

I had this problem with my toshiba satellite when I got it last September.
The bios complained it had an invalid media format.  Fortunately, I had a
built in floppy, but there are a few ways around this:

If I remember right, there has been a long availble program to allow an
install linux while running windows.  Just download the distribution into
a directory and run a little executable which will load up the kernel,
mount the drive, and then the setup process begins.  This should be no
problem, unless you have windowphobia.

Does your tecra has a built in ethernet jack?  On mine, the bios can
initialize it and look for a dhcp to boot from.  That might get you
started.

One tried and true way of installing linux with uncooperative laptop is to
move the hard drive over to a laptop with friendly hardware.  When you are
done installing, simply swap the drives over.  This would require swapping
the hard drive in their little carriers.  It takes only a few minutes, but
this is a handy method for installations that will go into very slow
notebooks, such as installing gentoo on a 386.

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