I have a Toshiba A75 running XP Pro that has an internal 24x burner and an IBM Thinkpad T21 that's running Win98. I want to put the laptop on Mandrake Linux, and I downloaded and installed the necessary ISOs. I burned the ISOs on the Toshiba using Alcohol 120%, but they don't show up as readable on the Thinkpad. I tried this with an ISO of Windows XP Pro. It didn't read. I tried burning the ISOs with Nero Express, and the same problem persisted.
Mandrake and XP Pro are supposed to be bootable, but neither booted. Neither even shows up as a CD in Win98. Is there something else I should try on the Toshiba to burn these suckers and get this Thinkpad running XP?
The CDs should be bootable, regardless of whether you can read them in an OS like windows. Just try booting with them, and if that fails, you must have burnt it incorrectly.
I think we could use a general tech support thread.
Threads with single questions and about 3-5 replies at most all over the board are kinda useless.
I guess I agree.
Short threads aren't always bad, but most of these are so specific they're not likely to get more replies after the problem is resolved.
Also, a few of them end quickly with "Nevermind, I figured it out" which is sort of boring for other people.
You're right. They should be absolutely bootable. I double-checked the BIOS in the T21; it indeed is capable of booting from the CD-ROM. I even tried killing the hard drive in the boot sequence entirely, and it doesn't read the disks. There's gotta be something else I can try. Maybe if I had a USB floppy, I could use an old 98 bootable 3.5" that has MSCDEX on it and try installing it that way?
Or maybe I should just sell the T21 for the same $150 I paid for it (A real bargain) and drop about five hundred or so on a laptop that already has XP on it and can outperform the Thinkie...
Does it boot/read pressed CDs correctly?
Also, do these burned CDs work in other machines? (I'm guessing this is in fact the case, but just checking ;-)
Push comes to shove, if the BIOS supports booting from USB storage, you may be able to use a floppy drive and ethernet to network-install. I used to do this a lot on my machines, as it was far more convenient to have my Linux distribution CDs all stuffed into a directory in one place, and install using NFS.
(and these days, I have my Gentoo distfiles and portage tree sitting on my webserver. Makes for a speedy stage3 install. :-)
I'm suspicious of the machine's CD-ROM drive being an issue. I know for a fact that both Thinkpad T20s and T22s boot burned CDs just fine. Although I generally burn my CDs under Linux -- haven't used a Win32 CD burning program in years.