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Booting from the BIOS

Posted: Sun Jun 19, 2005 4:49 pm
by Calum
Hey peoples

I'm trying to load Sun Solaris as my single OS on my computer, but I have encountered a problem. I can't seem to find a way to boot to/from the BIOS! I want to tell the computer to boot off of the CD-ROM drive yet when I press F2 at start up the computer just freezes up ??? I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 (Pentium 3, 700megahertz, 256 mb RAM and Windows XP Professional) I hope that this little bit of info can help. If you could tell me directly, or point me to a useful site, that would be awesome, I've tried a few sites already that are useless. Anyways, cheers ;)

Re:Booting from the BIOS

Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 6:24 am
by mystran
Have you tried other traditional BIOS setup entering keys. I've met at least one box that claimed the key was F2, but in reality it wanted Delete instead. Also try pressing ESC if you have a boot-logo, so that you can see what it says on the POST screen.

One BIOS I had to deal with would complain about CMOS checksums only when entering the BIOS setup. At that point it would want F1 for resume. But it wouldn't disable the boot-logo when you told it to enter setup. So you'd never see the "press F1 to resume" prompt unless you got rid of the logo manually by pressing escape first.

Also, if you are using USB keyboard, then try connecting a PS/2 one. Some BIOS don't like USB keyboard for BIOS Setup even though they otherwise support the legacy keyboard emulation.

In other word: try everything. Some BIOS are tough to enter.

Re:Booting from the BIOS

Posted: Mon Jun 20, 2005 5:07 pm
by Calum
Thanks A Lot!!! but I still can't get it working... there is a possibility that the disk that I want to boot from has a bad *.iso file on it, but I have done exactly as the thing told me to do ??? it's really starting to irritate me >:( ahh well, but if anyone has found a good floppy diskette image of Solaris 10, can you post it here? I might have better luck with that, well cheers :D P.S changing the keybord etc might be a good idea, but my computer is a Laptop, so I can't :-\

Re:Booting from the BIOS

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 1:28 am
by Candy
Is it a compaq laptop with a different hard disk than the original? I have one of those (also with different hard disk) and they store the settings-stuff of the bios on the harddisk. Which also means that when the harddisk crashes, you can't get to the bios anymore, since there isn't any.

Mine still claimed it worked with F10, which obviously didn't work. I copied the files and put it in the boot menu ::)

Re:Booting from the BIOS

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 4:43 am
by mystran
BIOS setup in a bootmenu? Now that's the first GOOD thing I hear about those hardware-stored BIOSes.

Re:Booting from the BIOS

Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 5:29 am
by Candy
mystran wrote: BIOS setup in a bootmenu? Now that's the first GOOD thing I hear about those hardware-stored BIOSes.
The setup was as much a part of the boot menu as the Windows install... you could boot to the bios and change stuff, and then you could reboot again. Yet, it'd be a good idea in a way if it were properly integrated so that you didn't have to reboot again.

Somebody at Asus or Gigabyte or sth port LinuxBIOS to the mainstream bioses. I don't want to spend half a minute watching that "Award" stuff do nothing.