Old Dell + Ubunutu

[PeterStoba]

Hi,

Recently got an old dell off ebay for my brother to play flash games instead of using my pc. Nothing special, P3, 20GB hdd, etc...

I've just come to set it up and found that it wont boot from disk drive no matter what I try and as there is no OS installed it's useless. What can I do?

Take the hard drive out and use my main pc to install it or is there a work around?

Thanks,

Peter.

[alsenior]

just gab a spare cd drive and plug that into the main board the dell should allow you to boot with the case open

Edit: failing that if the bios supports network boot you could do a network install of debian

[PeterStoba]

just gab a spare cd drive and plug that into the main board the dell should allow you to boot with the case open

If it wont let me boot from the CD/DVD drive already in it, will it let me boot from a different IDE drive?

[PeterStoba]

Right, managed to power the hard drive from the dell and connect it to my own pc, and install linux onto it, (ubuntu 7 from a cd i had) onto the dell hdd. After it had finished i disconnected everything, and botted up my own pc but now i get a "grub loading 1.5, error 17" when trying to boot from either of the hard drives, what to do?!?

[synaesthesia]

Not something like an optiplex gx1 is it? If so, you could have some fun with it.
Worth taking a peek inside too just to make sure the capacitors on the motherboard aren't leaking and therefore sending the operational voltages in the system loopy. Most GX1's were pre-naff-formula-stealing-capacitors though so might be safe.

[PeterStoba]

I've got the Optiplex GX150 (i think) running ubuntu now, thats the least of my worries now though.

I'm pretty sure a re install of vista would fix it, but I don't want to do that again. I might just wait for a few days until i've installed my new processor and then reinstall vista...

[alsenior]

just just need to fix the mbr record on the pc hard drive. i think there is a repair option on the disc that allows you to do that.

[aidanjt]

Download the SystemRescueCD, mount the harddrive to /mnt/custom, run `chroot /mnt/custom /bin/bash', run `grub', in the grub shell, type `root (hd0,0)', assuming of course, that the /boot or / partition is {h,s}da1, then `setup (hd0)', `quit' grub shell, `exit' the chroot, and `reboot' the machine. That should fix it.

I don't know why, but Ubuntu and Debian have some of the doziest partition, and boot handling installer code of all the distros.