help: installing Elyssa on an old laptop

[bob123]

About a year ago, I successfully installed Daryna on an "old" laptop: a toshiba portege m200. Now I'd love to upgrade to Elyssa by doing a fresh install from scratch, but I find myself unable to do it. The major hurdle is that this laptop doesn't have a CD drive and doesn't boot from USB. When I installed Daryna, I got around this by installing from the hard disk by doing something like this from grub (/dev/sdb1 is a USB key):

Code: Select all

kernel (hd0,1)/linuxmint/casper/vmlinuz file=/dev/sdb1/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper ramdisk_size=1048576 root=/dev/ram rw
initrd (hd0,1)/linuxmint/casper/initrd.gz
boot

When I do this with Elyssa, I get a SQUASHFS error. What can I do to install Elyssa on this laptop? Thanks!

PXE would've been a nice alternative..

[Husse]

You are the second one asking about this recently
I know there is a topic about this somewhere in the forum, probably the how to section
Please search the forum
It's not for Elyssa originally but there may have been something added
If I have the time I'll do a search too as I want a link to that solution

[Guest]

Thanks for the reply. I had searched the forums before posting, but found no solution.. Here's some of the stuff I found searching:

There's a thread about PXE, but not any conclusion..
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... =46&t=7724

Another thread about installing from HD, which you replied to..
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 46&t=16274

Another thread installing from HD, which points to an article explaining to do pretty much what I'm already doing..
http://www.linuxmint.com/forum/viewtopi ... 46&t=13556

At this point I'm thinking I would have to dig deep into the casper scripts and somehow force them to mount my USB key. Or try to get PXE working. I do have an external HD I might be able to use (not boot from though), but I suppose the probleme will be kind of the same as with the USB key, in other words how will the scripts know to mount the drive and get the files from it. Unfortunately I doubt I will have time to do any of this.. :\

[Husse]

You have Daryna installed - right?
It is possible to mount an ISO with loop (have to dig a bit to get the exact commands to use)
I don't know if that gives you an opportunity to install - probably not....

[merlwiz79]

file=/dev/sdb1/preseed/ubuntu.seed should be file=/dev/sdb1/preseed/mint.seed

[Husse]

Why didn't I see that??
Hopefully you should get it going now

[Guest]

@merlwiz79

file=/dev/sdb1/preseed/ubuntu.seed should be file=/dev/sdb1/preseed/mint.seed

It would've been a great catch.. but like I said, that's what I used for Daryna. For Elyssa (although I failed to mention it), I did use file=/dev/sdb1/preseed/mint.seed, yet it didn't work.

In fact when I later thought about it, I was even surprised that /dev/sdb1/preseed/ubunto.seed worked, because I don't see how that could be a valid path under any circumstance. /dev/sdb1 would first have to be mounted for the filesystem to be accessible. I'm thinking the file= argument was ignored..

@Husse
Well I did mount the CD (mount -o loop LinuxMint-5-r1.iso /mnt/temp) in order to copy the contents of it to my hard disk. Or did you mean mounting from busybox? In busybox I can mount the hard disk with the contents of the CD, but I'd have to dive into the scripts in order to figure out how to get them to use that. Oddly, I can't mount the USB key from busybox.

[AK Dave]

If you really want help, start a thread under an appropriate topic heading instead of performing thread necromancy on an unrelated topic.

Hello everybody, my old laptop will not boot properly after an upgrade. It freezes when it starts up. Is there any way to retrieve old data on the laptop hard drive? I think the upgrade was a Windows upgrade. My laptop is an old toshiba. The problem is I can't get into Windows, though I can get into CMOS. How do I get my old laptop to retrieve old data from hard drive?

Sometimes the only way to do this is to yank the hard drive and piggyback it into another computer, typically a desktop computer. Occasionally you can recover everything through a bootable CD, reinstalling the original OS. But too often this just overwrites the problem and destroys the very data you're trying to recover.

I suggest NOT writing ANYTHING to that drive until you can read it and recover the data to another computer.

You do have a backup, right?

Oh, no backup? Sorry.

[Husse]

If you really want help, start a thread under an appropriate topic heading instead of performing thread necromancy on an unrelated topic.

I must agree with AK Dave and request that you start o new topic for a new problem
There are enough "loose ends" in the forum anyway
And I might decide to disregard the post.....