Old Laptop/Needs Linux OS

N

NeedaComputer

Member
I saved an old laptop from the garbage. It's a ThinkPad 760XL. It has Windows NT installed on it. It seems as if it was setup to only run a few programs. There is no log on, but it brings you to a window where you choose which one to run. I can access the "Start" menu, but there is nothing of any help there. Everything not nessesary to the end user has been removed, and I cannot "right" click anywhere. I cannot access the hard disk, and I can't Boot up into DOS using F8.
There is only a CD-ROM drive, and I cannot set the CD-ROM drive as a bootable drive in the BIOS.
All I want to do is erase all the windows stuff and install puppy linux or something equally small.
Any takers?
 
You could always run a few live distros to see which one would work better there. You won't want a Red Hat distro there. Gentoo, Mephis, Zenwalk(slackware's latest flavor), Darnsmall, and a few others could make the list. Knoppix isn't that large either and you can use the live for cd versions to bail out Windows systems at times.
 
PC eye said:
You could always run a few live distros to see which one would work better there. You won't want a Red Hat distro there. Gentoo, Mephis, Zenwalk(slackware's latest flavor), Darnsmall, and a few others could make the list. Knoppix isn't that large either and you can use the live for cd versions to bail out Windows systems at times.
Click to expand...

Well, I have a Live-CD, but I can't set the CD-ROM as bootable in the BIOS. I can set the network, or PCMCIA card as a bootable device. I don't have a network card, a PCMCIA card, nor a floppy disk. Once it loads Windows NT, there seems to be absolutely nothing I can click or modify. I do have a serial port, and parallel port.

Could these ports be used as boot devices and then have the laptop run something from my desktop?
 
You can't run another type of OS already on the laptop's drive to install another OS like Linux on a Window drive or vice versa. With that version of NT running you could custom install a newer version of Windows like 2000 or XP where that would install to a second directory like Window2K or WindowXP. Most Linux distros even some small ones will require two separate partitions namely the "root" and one for virtual memory called the "swap".

Linux distros are generally seen in iso images where some can be copied onto a drive and mounted to run on a virtual drive. If you press the F8 key when first turning on the laptop do you see a boot menu there? In order to even use a recovery disk on a laptop there should be an option to choose which drive to boot from. What make and model laptop is that? There are a few links that give details on installing Linux on laptops/notebooks.
http://www.linux-on-laptops.com/

For installing Linux using a network here's one link that may help out. http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Network-Install-HOWTO.html

Your problem there is the need to be able to partition and format the hard drive for vfat. There's hope here with being able to get a distro running from within Windows itself. In the following article NTFS is preferred. http://topologi-linux.sourceforge.net/index.php?menu=2
 
Thank you for all the info. The one big problem I am facing is that I need the administrators password in order to do anything with this system. If I hit <F8>, It gives me an error, and then displays some numbers and letters. I will check out some of those links you posted. Thanks again.
 
There used to be an old linux boot disk utility called LinNT which I can no longer find via google. It seems that the company that developed it got bought out and they are now charging for similiar applications.

If you can get your system to actually boot from CD I suggest downloading and running auditor. It has utilities that can crack user accounts and passwords.

can you reset the cmos on your laptop and put bios settings back to default so you can change them?
 
I think what I need is something to crack the BIOS password. There is no way for me to run or do anything other than what the administrator originally intended for this Laptop.
 
You could try removing the battery on the board to see if clearing the cmos will void the password for the bios. As far as other passwords used in Windows you would need a recovery tool for that. Since someone tossed it in the trash they had some reason for having password protection on it especiially if it was originally used by a business.
 
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