It seems, Admiral, that I have all his marbles.
N00b here. To make a long story short: my hard drive died, and I replaced it with a new one, blank and innocent. Now I'm trying to give it an operating system-- Fedora Core 4.
Problem: it's a laptop, and the CD drive is an external USB device (I downloaded the four .iso files for x86-compatible machines from redhat.com). I don't think BIOS is detecting the drive-- the boot drive options in BIOS are the hard drive, the CD-ROM drive, and the removable floppy drive, but it can't seem to find anything bootable.
For what it's worth, the drive does power up when I turn on the computer, and it sounds like it's reading. I tried putting a CD that I know is bootable in the drive and booting from that, just to make sure it isn't my download CDs that are the problem, and it can't detect that either.
The book I've got (Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed, by Hudsons, Ball, & Duff) seems to be saying it's possible to boot from an external drive on a laptop, but is not specific about what I have to do. Is it the boot.iso image that I need? It describes making a boot CD from that for other purposes, but isn't clear on whether that's what I have to do in this situation.
Thanks in advance. (Crossposted to fedora_linux.)
Problem: it's a laptop, and the CD drive is an external USB device (I downloaded the four .iso files for x86-compatible machines from redhat.com). I don't think BIOS is detecting the drive-- the boot drive options in BIOS are the hard drive, the CD-ROM drive, and the removable floppy drive, but it can't seem to find anything bootable.
For what it's worth, the drive does power up when I turn on the computer, and it sounds like it's reading. I tried putting a CD that I know is bootable in the drive and booting from that, just to make sure it isn't my download CDs that are the problem, and it can't detect that either.
The book I've got (Red Hat Fedora 4 Unleashed, by Hudsons, Ball, & Duff) seems to be saying it's possible to boot from an external drive on a laptop, but is not specific about what I have to do. Is it the boot.iso image that I need? It describes making a boot CD from that for other purposes, but isn't clear on whether that's what I have to do in this situation.
Thanks in advance. (Crossposted to fedora_linux.)