Gentoo BootCD undetected on N3310 laptop.

VisualPhoenix

Hey guys. I have a HP Pavilion (piece of garbage) N3310 laptop with the newest BIOS revision available from HP. Most CDs that are bootable will work (debian, redhat, mandrake, beos, w2k, etc) however the bootable gentoo cd will not boot.

That being said, i'm DYING to put Gentoo on my laptop. But. A problem arises.

I've tried the boot disk method listed here in the forums, booted off the boot disk, followed the directions up to the emerge sync step when i noticed... PROBLEM. My Linksys (another piece of crap) PCM100 pcmcia card is not loaded properly by the tomsrtbt distribution boot disk since its based on the 2.2.x kernel and my card will only work on a later kernel revision with updated pcmcia drivers.

So now I cant boot gentoo live to install it, I cant boot off of a boot disk and get it to work -- and i've tried about 3 other rescue CDs (that boot properly on my box) to find that they in turn either do not support my ethernet card out of the box and dont come with proper drivers for it either.

Anyone here wanna hint at something i can do to gentoo-ize my laptop?

Thanks
-Ray "VisualPhoenix"

pjp · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 5:16 pm Post subject:

Which file did you use for the bootable Gentoo CD?
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VisualPhoenix · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 5:36 pm Post subject:

I've tried them all from gentoo-ix86-1.2.iso to the livecd... in fact i have a burn of every gentoo distribution here and none work. They work on my main box but not this laptop... It just wont detect as a bootable cd for some reason. I've tried burning the discs at all different speeds too -- 2 cds are burned at 1x and the others at 16x.

Its pretty weak esp since other distribs have no problem booting.

-Ray "VisualPhoenix"

Curious · Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2002 11:24 pm Post subject:

If you look near the bottom of the 'Floppy Install HOWTO' in the Tips & Tricks forum, there's a link to a floppy disk image that lets you boot arbitary bootable CD's without going through the bios.

Give it a go?

http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=8736

-- Curious
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VisualPhoenix · Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2002 2:35 pm Post subject:

Hey man... thanks a bundle. The bootdisk allowed my gentoo CD to boot perfectly...

There is a PROBLEM but i'll post it to a new topic in the forums. Thx for the boot help!