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#1 2009-01-27 22:48:11

Gandalf515
Member
Registered: 2009-01-27
Posts: 21

Booting up

Good day!

I apologize in advance if this isn't the right section/forum for this particular problem I have, but I'm quite desperate, and these forums seem to be filled with tech-wizards I can only hope to rival one day wink

My problem is this: I was given a secondhand laptop by my brother a few days ago, which I wanted to clear and install a linux distro on. I tried Arch before, but had no internet access at the time, and only just dove into the whole world of Linux. After that I installed Xubuntu, and it is this distro I am still using. However, on my new laptop, I wish to install Arch, but having some difficulty getting there. I tried burning an iso and getting it to boot up, but it would never recognize it as a bootdisk (it would on this laptop though). Even other distro's it wouldn't recognize. Except for one occassion a few days ago when it would boot up the Fedora disk and install. This wasn't the distro I wanted though, as I had a lot of trouble getting my hardware to work, and I knew how much time I would have to put in to fix all that agian. So I tried to see if it would recognize a few versions of Windows I had lying around. None of these were recognized either, except for the recovery disk that came with the new laptop. Seeing as that was my only method of getting atleast one OS on it, I installed Vista from this disk.

My first question to you now though, is it possible that the manufacturer, Asus, sort of "locked" up the BIOS to not allow any boot-cd to work except the recovery disk? If so, how come Fedora did get through? I can't replicate this oddity at the moment, as I lost that disk Fedora was on.

My next attempt at solving this was to bypass the whole cd thing, and just put the iso on a 16gig usb-stick, and boot that up. Same problem however. I tried to look around the internet to see if I could maybe update the BIOS to see if that worked, but I know what can go wrong when not done correctly, and I couldn't find anything about how, where and when I could find any updates on this. I tried different settings in the BIOS, from ignoring the harddrive at bootup, to disabling the cd-drive in the IDE-settings when I tried my usb-stick.

I really am at my wits end here, and I have no idea why that laptop ignores any boot-cd/boot-usb-stick. I hope some of you can help me.

Thanks in advance,

Neal van Veen.

Edit: And ofcourse, the moment I posted this, and had reflashed my usb-stick with an .img-file instead of .iso-file of Arch, it booted into the screen. Will update on how things are going, because I sincerely doubt everything would go right, knowing my string of fortune with computers.

Last edited by Gandalf515 (2009-01-27 22:50:17)

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#2 2009-01-28 17:12:37

ahcaliskan
Member
From: Sweden
Registered: 2008-10-29
Posts: 174

Re: Booting up

I don't think Asus would lock your BIOS in anyway, if so, try upgrading bios. If you usb-stick boots, then you will not have any issues with the installtion. Good luck!

Last edited by ahcaliskan (2009-01-28 17:14:42)

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