Lucid puppy installation on sony pcg-r505el help

[shadowseeker]

I am somewhat a linux noob, ive gotten comfortable with using mint on my emachine el1352-41w, but im lost when it comes to compiling your own kernel when it comes to handling a exotic hardware, etc. please hear me out.

Just got a sony vaio pcg-r505el from a second hand store. It works without a hitch. Just installed xp pro sp3 over the win2000 that was on it. Now i am interested in putting a lightweight distro on it. tried lucid puppy 5.2.8, but when it is loading drivers needed to run livecd, it says 'lupu_528.sfs' not found. one thing to know about this laptop is that it does not have a built-in cd drive. bios does not have a usb boot feature. only type of optical drive it has is a cd-rw/dvd-rom combo in its dock, which i have. the laptop uses the disc drive in a firewire fashion. after puppy loads the needed drivers for the hardware, it apparently does not have a driver for the dock or the disc drive therein, so when it tries to find the filesystem for lupu, it does not see the installation cd in the drive, because of the lack of a driver. my vaio's bios supports os installation booting for the dock drive, but linux does not seem to have the driver needed when the bios hands over the task of continuing installation to whatever software might be on the disk. help!

 

[c911darkwolf]

Did you do a MD5 sum check on the ISO to make sure it wasn't corrupt before you burned it to a CD ?

Is it not possible to take the CDRom out of the dock and plug it in directly?

There is a process out their to make a USB drive look like a CDROM for a install. that might be your better option.

This machine is old enough it's not gonna do a whole lot from the looks of it

 

[shadowseeker]

I could do a MD5 sum check just to make, but ive had this disk since before i settled on mint with my desktop, i know it to work. The laptop has no accessory slots whatsoever, only thing that slides in is the battery. Could explain more of that process to make a usb look like a cdrom?

As it is now, the laptop has a PIII-M 1133mhz cpu, 384ram(128 soldered to board, 256 sdram in expansion, 512 max capable, for a total of 640mb), and a 30gb hdd. I had hopes of uprading the ram to 640, the cpu to 1.4ghz celeron m 330, and the hdd to an 80gb ide. but i might just have to settle with xp and a lightweight and FOSS software selection. :/

 

[audiovoodoo]

With the Sony you will not be able to boot from USB, it's just not supported. I seriously doubt that the problem with Puppy is a driver issue, the fact that it boots and gives you the error shows that the device is recognised, the CD read and that it's then attempting to read files and load them. It might be as simple as it being an old cd comparability issue, some of the older drives get funny about +R or -R discs. I'd suggest testing the disc on your other machine and maybe try burning the disc again.

 

[shadowseeker]

Yes, the disc works, i am typing this response while using the disc in livecd mode on desktop. There are old guides to get an older release of gentoo on this lappy, might try those. I've already tried installing lubuntu, slitaz, xubuntu, macpup, reactos, chrome linux os and mint xfce. If gentoo doesn't pan out, i'll stay with windows.

 

[audiovoodoo]

I think you missed my point re disc format. Your XP disc if original is a mastered disc rather than a burnt one, your linux disc is burnt and therefore potentially an issue due to +R -R differences. Try another brand of disc.

 

[shadowseeker]

Okay, will try.

 

[shadowseeker]

I have tried, but to no avail. A friend said i might be able to install lubuntu using wubi. thanks for your help.