Has anyone tried this trick?

[Robert Blacquiere]

On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 03:46:10PM -0500, Lei Z wrote:
> Hi,
>
<snip> 
> I bought an Armada m300 (it came with no floppy or CD-ROM drive) from ebay
> a few days ago. 

Try pxebooting of the laptop, i've got the same notebook and the intel
pxe boot works. There is a document on the web about jumpstarting
FreeBSD that's a usefull guide to do the install.  

>I tried various possibilities to get this to work.  When
> the laptop hard disk was in the desktop, it worked flawlessly just like a
> regular desktop hard disk with every OS I tested with including DOS, win
> 98, win2k (no chance to try FreeBSD yet). But after I put it back to the
> laptop with installed OS, the partition was recognized and bootable only
> when DOS was installed. When the primary partion was installed with win98,
> or win2k, the disk is simply not bootable. Also, DOS extended partition is
> not recognized in the laptop either. I created the primary partition under
> DOS, during Windows 2000 installation, or under desktop's Windows XP
> (laptop disk mounted as slave), but the results were mostly the same.

Net boot seems to be a good alternative.
> 
> Is this a BIOS incompatibility, or something else? Has anybody got
> successful experience with this trick? A quick search showed that Armada
> m300 doesn't seem to have a special reserved partition like some other
> laptops. Thanks for any hints, suggestions to get this work.
> 
> Leo
> 
> 

Robert

-- 
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