Gateway 2000 SOLO laptop wont boot

[T22 4me]

Long story short;I reformatted hard drive in this older laptop with intentions of installing Linux.

Have tried installing several distros from bootable cd,have tried to reinstall w98.

Cannot get it to boot from cdrom or floppy either one .Yes have changed boot order over and over to no avail.

Have installed Linux on my T22 several times with no problems,Have done various desk top installs windows and Linux/older and newer pcs/have done dual boot systems never run into to one that wouldnt
boot from a cd or floppy one.I even pulled the hard drive and hooked it up to my desktop to test it and it tested fine.


All input welcome.................thanks

 

[dipique]

You might try flashing the BIOS, and making sure that all the peripheral cords are connected correctly, etc.

Dan

 

[LA1]

it probably is your cdrom drive in the notebook, does the cd drive show up in the bios ? , try .. unplug the power remove the battery.
Take the cd drive out, i think there is a latch on the bottom, take the drive out and insert back in with some force, Outside of that the drive could have died. oh yeah, do not ever set a bios password. if you forget the password there is no way to recover, Gateway has no way either. I work for a private company. We service there notebooks, they have maybe 50 gATEWAY SOLOs out of a couple of hundred that the password was set.

 

[T22 4me]

I have it now booting from w98 startup floppy.(It says CDrom identified by the way)I am starting with cdrom support ;but, how do I get it to start the install.Is there a DOS comand like D:/install or something?

thanks

 

[CrazeD]

You have to type fdisk and delete all previous partitions, then make a new one (or as many as you want).

Then type format c: and wait for it to finish.

Then restart and start with CD-ROM support and it should start installing.