Linux won't install with XP

[ScreamerChaotix]

Having just purchased a new Toshiba A45-S150 laptop today, I was anxious to split the hard drive for a dual boot with Linux. Now I know XP and Linux don't exactly go hand in hand, but I tried resizing the XP partition nonetheless. While installing Linux in the free space though, I received an error about a particular file not loading properly. I continued on, and found that when it showed the images to be booted by lilo, there was nothing there. I figured it was a bad disc, so I tried another...same error, but for a different file, this one I remember being glibc.

The hard drive works fine when there's nothing but XP, but installing Linux has given me nothing but errors. I strongly doubt Toshiba would have a computer that wasn't Linux friendly, but before I try wiping out Windows completely, does anyone have any suggestions?

 

[asm1]

i have a tosh satalite but it wont take Linux, the problem i have is that Linux wont see all the screen, never had any probs installing though.

The tougher it gets the more you learn! The more you learn the tougher it gets!

 

[wybnormal]

Which distro are you trying to install? I've had issues with some distros not working on hardware and yet another works fine. Have you tried any of the bootable CDs yet? Knoppix? Lindows? Morphix? Mandrake? etc..etc.. They are a easy way to test the hardware before spending alot ot timing installing only to see it fail in the end.

MikeS


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Sun Tzu

 

[jrjuiliano]

XP doesn't like partitioning software very much. Worse yet, using those imaging disks that come with a laptop can give you headaches as well. This is why I instlaled Windows 2000 one side and Gentoo on another. I just dropped the XP home image disc completely in my case.

If there are boot options to try, use either the "nofb", "nodetect" or "noscsi" options to load up the installation software. Last time I tried I believe the noscsi option worked best.

This is a reason I went with Gentoo. It takes a Loooooong time to load it, but you learn more with it and get a great group of software to ... uh ... "boot".

As far as getting Win XP to work, hopefully you've already tried Partition Magic to move the XP partition, and other Linux Laptop goodies are at

http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/toshiba.html

J.R.

 

[ScreamerChaotix]

Thanks to all for the help. I had done some reading online (which I should have done in the first place) and learned that Pentium 4's had issues with Linux...of course, that was back in 2000. I assumed the problems must have been corrected by now, but having just purchased this machine, I wanted to be assured I could run whatever I wanted on it.

Ironically, it seems as though the first 3 or 4 install attempts were flukes. It eventually worked, although I still get errors saying certain files couldn't be loaded.

Sorry for the lack of information, I was racing the clock in the first post. I had tried installing both Mandy 9.0 and 9.2 (normally I have slack on hand, but this was it for now) and neither seemed to work at first. 9.2 gives the error "unable to load aspell-en-0.51.0-1mdk.i586" and 9.0 gave a similar error about glibc. As I said, it works fine now, so that's good enough for me. Thanks again for the help.