[Cialug] "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"

[Nathan C. Smith]

IBM laptops often have an F10 or F12 option at boot time to choose the boot
device.  On other laptops it could be F2 or... ?

Give those a try.  Also watch the boot prompts sometimes there is a "press
key to boot from CD" option.

-Nate 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rachel Garrett [mailto:rmgarrett at gmail.com] 
> 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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