Re: Multiple XP Start-Up Problems - Looking for Help with Prioriti

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Hi Paul,

Thanks for your detailed post. I will keep it in mind for the future when I
have a little more time to work with the notebook computer.

Because the CD drive will not allow booting from media (maybe one or two
times out of 20), and the primary battery only lasts about five minutes... I
have come to the conclusion that the notebook isn't worth spending much more
time on. I can still use it in DOS mode if I boot from a floppy, or in safe
mode in XP.

I really do appreciate all of the time you took with your post.

Thanks

Jeff

"Paul" wrote:

Jeff wrote:
Hi Dave,

This may sound like a pretty ridiculous question, but, I would like to make
sure of the answer before making a decision about buying a new notebook
computer.

Being that my current notebook computer will not read from the CD during
boot-up (at least not most of the time), I would believe that this would be a
hardware problem as you have suggested (motherboard, cabling, or the CD
drive).

Is there anything that may have been caused by a virus or malware that would
interfere with the boot-up process?

If this is a hardware problem, I should probably just bite the bullet and
buy a new notebook. I just want to make sure I look at everything before
placing an order.

Thanks for your help.

Jeff


If you want to test your laptop, with a different OS and software, you could
try Ubuntu.

For this test, I happened to have downloaded the Ubuntu 9.04 ISO, for
preparing a boot CD. But I hadn't burned a CD with it yet. (I usually
try to test new Linux distros, by booting them in Windows Virtual PC.
If they won't boot there, I don't burn a CD using that software.)

So I dug out a CDRW (because some distros, I end up throwing them away,
and I try to use CDRW so the cost is zero). I used Nero to prepare a bootable
CD from the downloaded file.

I would plug that CD into your workstation, and not the laptop. Because
you say the CD drive on the laptop doesn't work. If your workstation
has a burner, that can handle burning a 700MB CD, then you can prepare
the CD there.

then, boot the workstation with the Ubuntu CD.

The first prompt you see, will be for the language. I hit return immediately,
as the default was correct. Then, you will see the Ubuntu main boot menu.
The first option in the list, is to "Boot without installing anything". I
selected that option.

It took a while to get booted. (I think my Knoppix CD boots faster.)

One of the menu items, from the menus at the top, include an option to
prepare a bootable USB Flash stick. I have an 8GB USB flash, which is
big enough to hold a 700MB CD image with room to spare. So I selected the
option in Ubuntu, to prepare a bootable USB flash.

One option in the dialog, is whether you want a "persistent store" area
on your USB flash, and I set that to the bottom option, which is to throw
everything away at the end of a session. This is to prevent Ubuntu from
doing a lot of writes to my USB flash.

So, now I was ready for a test.

On my computer, if I press F11 just after the power comes on, I get a
temporary boot menu. In the boot menu, are the usual hard drive and
internal CD drive options. Now that my Ubuntu flash stick was plugged in,
that was offered as an option in the temporary boot menu. So I selected
that for a boot.

It seemed to take longer to boot from USB flash, than from my CD/DVD
drive. My USB flash stick reads at 30MB/sec, so it should have handily
beat the Ubuntu CD in terms of boot time. Yet, it seemed to be slower.

When you boot from either the Ubuntu CD or the USB flash, you have to
leave the media plugged in, for the entire Ubuntu session. At least with the
flash, there is no droning noise from the CD drive.

In the Ubuntu menu, is a program called Brasero, which appears to be
a CD/DVD burning program. If your internal drive on the laptop is
a burner, then you could test it with that. Since you're booted at
this point from the USB flash, you should be free to change media
on the optical drive.

Linux uses "mount" and "umount" commands, to allow the use of any
media. If the tray won't open on the CD drive, chances are the
drive is "busy", because the media is mounted. Unmounting it,
or using an eject option from a menu, may free it up.

The only thing I found a bit strange about Ubuntu, was I couldn't
find a GUI element to control reboot, shutdown, or poweroff. I
was able to do that, by opening a "Terminal" window and giving
a text command. For example

sudo poweroff now

sudo shutdown now

sudo reboot

or the like, are ways to stop the Linux session. They should allow
the OS to properly unmount and sync any file systems, so they don't
get damaged (depending on what file systems you've been using,
like reading your hard drive or whatever). So it would appear
that Ubuntu expects you to use the manual page, as in

man poweroff

man shutdowh

to get any necessary options. I include the "now" option, because
that is what works on some other systems I've used.

So that is a quick recipe for booting a computer that has no
working CD drive. You can make a USB flash, as long as it is
big enough to hold 700MB of files.

One other note. The USB flash, includes an autorun.inf . Which
implies, they've set a trap on it, if the USB flash is plugged
in when Windows is running. The autorun.inf is set to open
"wubi", which appears to be an installer you can run from Windows.
I didn't particularly like that idea, so I edited the autorun.inf
file while I was preparing the USB flash. (After the flash was
loaded with software, I had a look around.) I just edited the
contents of the Open= option, so nothing would happen when it
is plugged in. If I need to actually install Ubuntu, I'd just
use the CD. Other than that, it looked OK.

So with the Brasero program (hope I spelled that right), you
should be able to test CD burning. And just browsing the CD,
should test the ability to read CDs.

Since you use your workstation to do all the preparatory
work, you're not relying on the laptop to do it.

Paul

.

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