windows is crashed, how do i turn it into a linux?

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di$TOrTed

New Member
Ok, I have an HP pavilion laptop and windows is completely screwed. Two years ago I burned out the gpu/motherboard and that had to be replaced. A few months ago windows crashed. I didn't make new reboot disks with the new motherboard so it wont let those work. It used to go to the repair screen and now it won't even do that.

Is there a way I can turn this dead machine into a linux laptop? I did my homework and openSUSE is the distribution I want to use. Can I just put the OS onto a CD and pop it in and install it? Is it that simple?

And what happens to all the data on my hard drive? Does it just get dumped?

Thanks guys

I'm not new to computers but I am not super computer-savvy either
 
I believe it to be in the user section but i'm not sure.

As far as I know it was split into a main section and an HP recovery section on the hdd if that means anything
 
never used Linux but you better get all the drivers and maybe compatible with the operating system or you will have another mess.
 
Boot the openSUSE live cd (do NOT install yet) and search your folders for your Windows instillation. It should be under users/(your username)/documents. Linux distros can read NTFS file systems so you do not need to make sure that the drives are the same format. copy all of the data that you want to save onto a different hard drive with a usb stick or external drive. Once you have all of the data that you want to save off of the laptop drive you can install openSUSE. This will destroy all of the data on the drive so make sure that you have everything on a separate drive or in a separate location that is not on the laptop.
 
salvage-this said:
Boot the openSUSE live cd (do NOT install yet) and search your folders for your Windows instillation. It should be under users/(your username)/documents. Linux distros can read NTFS file systems so you do not need to make sure that the drives are the same format. copy all of the data that you want to save onto a different hard drive with a usb stick or external drive. Once you have all of the data that you want to save off of the laptop drive you can install openSUSE. This will destroy all of the data on the drive so make sure that you have everything on a separate drive or in a separate location that is not on the laptop.
Click to expand...

Note that the LiveCDs are either KDE or GNOME, and I highly recommend you downloading the 4.7 GB DVD after you've played with the LiveCD. KDE is the default desktop environment btw, if you get the full 4.7 GB DVD you can choose to install GNOME, LXDE, and XFCE as well.
OpenSUSE is a very good distro, I used to use Ubuntu before I found this.
 
Ok well i did the openSUSE install and it does not work. When I try to boot it blanks out. I put in the disk, did boot from harddrive, and i clicked on FailSafe mode. It goes through its spiel of commands and the last line is "opening HAL daemon" and then the screen spazzes out. Some colors, lines, etc. It looks like a video malfunction. It is an HP pavilion with an nvidia 8600m GS.

Any ideas?
 
If your GPU has gone south again (distinct possibility), you might be entitled to a free repair under the NVidia class-action settlement.

If you decide to go Ubuntu, then this might help. Might help in any case, actually.
 
Could be your hard drive died -- I have seen this happen with HP laptop w/Hitachi hdd -- for some unknown reason, the hard drive has a chip that tells it its life is up. Wiping the drive with zeros
PHP: 
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4096 conv=notrunc,sync
caused the Hitachi hard drive to just roll over and die. Great planned obsolescence, if you ask me. (One of the reasons I won't go with HP)

I believe it was an older Pavilion with XP originally installed.
 
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