World’s first laptop, 25 years old and still running

Re:World’s first laptop, 25 years old and still running by tocomment on Tuesday October 26, 2010 @09:52AM (#1834141)

Somewhat related. I have a 12 year old laptop with a broken CDROM. Is there a way to load a lightweight linux using floppy disks or some other method?

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Re:World’s first laptop, 25 years old and still running by almost on Tuesday October 26, 2010 @09:59AM (#1834169)

If it has a USB port you can use either an external CDROM drive or a USB key drive.

If it has a network port then you can make a network boot floppy quite easily. This just contains enough to get the system booting off of an image retrieved from a TFTP server over the network.

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Re:World’s first laptop, 25 years old and still running by tocomment on Tuesday October 26, 2010 @02:44PM (#1835464)

So no network port.

I can't figure out a way to tell it to boot from a USB thumb drive. It doesn't list that option in the BIOS.

Would it still let me boot from an external CD ROM even though the BIOS doesn't mention USB? Maybe I could buy one.

Otherwise, any other thoughts?

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Re:World’s first laptop, 25 years old and still running by almost on Wednesday October 27, 2010 @09:53AM (#1838578)

Maybe, it's probably more likely it can boot from a USB CD-ROM than from a USD key. But I have no idea how much more likely.

Otherwise, you could maybe try a PCMCIA network card, assuming the laptop supports that.

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