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laptop - run XP/2000 from SD card

Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
Ok, a friend of mine asked me to fix his laptop, well as far as I can make out it is fucked, basicly when put in the HDD is undetectable wont boot wont be detected, the laptop works fine other than I believe the hard drive conection is fucked

so I thought bout running an OS by another means, usb? Sd? it has an inbuilt SD slot, I could install windows onto a 8gig or 16gig SD card and boot the laptop from that would it work? running an os by sd card, is there enough transfer rate on it? secondly could you run an os from a usb stick?

I know DSL (damn small linux) can run from SD/USB cards placed onto laptops, however I would prefer to run a Windows OS (as it'll be for laura)

Help....

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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Would work but it'd be slow I reckon, and you would need to have a lot memory. Any reason why the hard disk controller isnt working?
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I have no idea, Basicly doesn't boot up, so I took it out and popped in onto my sata external adapter, saved what I could, wiped it and popped it back in, doesn't reconise the volume

    when I try to install windows xp on it, it gives a list,

    Volume Unknown
    USB volume (the one i'm installing windows from)

    so it says there is an unknown volume but I can't get it to work.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    The SD card will be TOO slow for it to work, I'm not even sure it is possible anyway. You'd need to boot the drivers for the SD reader to even work. But the thing is, it usually takes my SD card to copy say 2GB around 10-20 mins. I've never counted it so I can't be possitive.

    Do it in USB. Have you troubleshooted the harddrive? Cables? Power supply? I have a harddrive that works perfectly, the cables/connectors are fine, but they don't work on the laptop through a external USB connection or any computer regardless of OS for that matter. Turns out it is just low power.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    the SD card reader must work somehow as it gives me the option to boot off of it (I had xp on a sd card and it allows me to use it as a boot device and also allows me to install windows onto the device)

    I got another laptop anyway but not sure what to do with this one,
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I see what you mean, thought I'd try it myself, it works. I know it doesn't work on my laptop though, the SD reader isn't loaded that soon. But my desktop one loads it up.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I don't know what do do with this laptop though, it has a perfectly good 2'5 inch sata hdd and seems to work, I just cannot get the laptop working with the motherboard,

    why would the laptop not be seeing the hdd?
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    HDD controller (on the laptop chipset) might be broken.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Which means a new mobo, I dont want to spend money on it, do you think a OS would run fast enough via a usb stick? if so I have a lovely usb stick i could use, tiny as well.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    what about this guide here, looks promising, no speed decreases.

    http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    It's worth a try :) I'm sure there are more things that could be wrong, try hexus.net or bit-tech.net for more expert advice if nothing else.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    http://vbulletin.thesite.org.uk/showthread.php?t=135497

    might be an interesting thought.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    You could take the HDD out, buy an enclosure for it and use it as an external.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Ive got an enclose I use to fix laptop and back up data, its a sata 2'5 or 3'5 docking station.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I think im going to go for linux, the running off the SD card works but there are other problems,

    I was thinking the one with the acer aspire one, limpus linux, but it is a bit to basic. i want something as easy to work as windows, not much learning required, runs mozilla, movies, music and word/open office
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    ubuntu is pretty easy to use, and for a lightweight version i can recommend xubuntu, I use it on my fileserver at home and it works pretty much flawlessly.

    you will have the most luck with ubuntu basically because it's the most popular version and therefore has the most support available.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Cool, how lightweight is lightweight? i'm going to try and install Linpus when I get home from work, see how it works, It's a very easy user interface (I've used it on the Acer Aspire One Laptops) but will see.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Hellfire wrote: »
    Cool, how lightweight is lightweight? i'm going to try and install Linpus when I get home from work, see how it works, It's a very easy user interface (I've used it on the Acer Aspire One Laptops) but will see.

    They created a new version of Linpus which they put on the Linpus website last night I tried it but it looks kind of tacky and child like compared to the version they had on the ACER ONE.

    What they had on the Acer looked good and worked well together - their new version is just a mashup of various free software off the net.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I've used linpus before and think it's pretty shoddy actually. It looks nice and works nice but it's so limited that you will find things you want to do but can't very quickly.

    DG - pretty much all linux is is a mashup of various free software off the net, the advantage is that because all the different software is standardised you can chop and change, so if you don't like your word processor change to another which accepts the standards and you're good to go.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    I'll try to install linpus just to see if the laptop is "working" (long story) and see what happens, and while downloading then i'll probably try moving over to xubuntu, does Openoffice and mozilla supprot Ubuntu? i've never used linux much before tbh,

    Whats Fredora (is that it) like? I was reading a little bit about that also.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    ShyBoy wrote: »
    I've used linpus before and think it's pretty shoddy actually. It looks nice and works nice but it's so limited that you will find things you want to do but can't very quickly.

    DG - pretty much all linux is is a mashup of various free software off the net, the advantage is that because all the different software is standardised you can chop and change, so if you don't like your word processor change to another which accepts the standards and you're good to go.

    The original Linpus on the netbook worked really well, email and contacts all nicely linked. Put in an SD card and the music player or photo software pops up. It also looked nice. All really good stuff for someone that doesn't know much about PC's


    The new version is basically a piece of junk in comparison to the orignal version that came on the netbook. This version basically looks like it was designed to appeal to a child.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Ok, works, which is the good things, proves the laptop will work and means I got a £500 laptop for nothing (ok the full HDD cannot be found but after installing Linpus I have a couple of gig which is enough :-p

    Thinking of now putting on Xbuntu, only problem is things like driver support for built in Wlan or webcam? can this be sorted?
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    DG wrote: »
    The original Linpus on the netbook worked really well, email and contacts all nicely linked. Put in an SD card and the music player or photo software pops up. It also looked nice. All really good stuff for someone that doesn't know much about PC's


    The new version is basically a piece of junk in comparison to the orignal version that came on the netbook. This version basically looks like it was designed to appeal to a child.

    I meant the original version as well, my friend used it on her netbook for about a week before she got fed up and despite it being nice as a toy for doing any kind of work or anything on it it was ridiculous. So I tried to add in some stuff through the backend but linpus just doesn't support enough to make it viable. I then put ubuntu on which worked great, but then stopped working due to a driver bug and since then it's been Windows 7.

    Hellfire - you may come across trouble with those kind of things although generally all the popular chipsets for wlan are covered now, I don't know about webcam though.
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Its still a £600 laptop for nothing, Acer Aspire 2920 :p
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Weird, I was installing Xubuntu 9.04 and it kept saying corrupt, I will try 8.04 now
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    That's bizarre, did you burn the CD at the lowest speed?
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    no, got it sorted, got 8.04, problem is now, i cant get wireless to work,

    It says the drivers installed, detects my card etc, however in the terminal it says

    configuration: driver=pcieport-driver
    network DISABLED

    rest of ti says wireless interface all the details of the card, so to me it says it is installed but disabled, how do i enable it?

    also seems power isn't getting to it as when i press the wireless button on the laptop - no light/turns wireless on :( HELP PLEASE
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    might just be the .conf LED, try over at ubuntu forums as they will be better able to fix it than me
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    it is the led i believe, i have it turned on i believe, I tried

    sudo cat /var/log/messages | grep -i kill

    and got some results but now i need to find our how to search for networks
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    Former MemberFormer Member Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
    Good ol'boys at ubuntu forums are helping,

    turns out my RF Killswitch is on, just trying to work out how to turn it off, the wifi button does not turn it off, it gives me the message when i press it and do the sudo cat /var/log/messages -i kill

    Jun 3 17:04:30 graeme-laptop kernel: [ 106.014026] kill switch must be turned off for wireless networking to work.
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