CD-ROM Boot MSI-1651

I ran into an issue tonight with my MSI-1651 and trying to boot off two different CDs.

What I wanted to do was repartition the hard drive. So the first thing I did was put in my GParted CD. It booted the CD and went to the GParted boot menu. However, when I hit enter to continue a Kernel panic came up and it hung. If I remember correctly it said something about not finding the CD-ROM.

So I decided to put in my System Rescue CD which is another Linux based CD with a bunch of utilities on it. It failed to completely boot as well saying it failed to mount the CD.

Any thoughts or experiences on this? Is the hardware too new such that my older System Rescue and GParted CDs can't discover IDE devices or something like that?

Just curious....

Thanks!

 

Yes, the hardware is likely too new.

The initial boot loader on the CD will start to load a livecd, but when the kernal switches the cd-reading function from hardware to software, it fails because your drive or controller is to new for the drivers included.

 

Are you going to install Windows? Why don't you just start with that since the installer lets you make partitions.

 

incidently, they are not ide drives, but sata drives.

One problem with partitioning with VISTA is that the VISTA partitioning method is slightly different then previous version of Windows and linux. Specifically. the offsets that mark the beginning and ending of partitions is off by just a little bit, which can cause problems with older partitioning and some imaging programs.

This is actually a good thing, in one respect, because partitioning hasn't changed in over a decade, and the changes are intended to improve future operating system installation and performance, but it is not 100 percent backward compatible with older software, which means using older software can render a vista partitioned machine inoperable depending on your disk layout scheme.

If you're just going vista, this will not be an issue, but if you plan to dual boot later, or resize partitions in non-compatible older software, you're asking for trouble.

So, a lot of people are using older programs to partition their disks and then installing Vista, which works just fine with the older partitions, but doesn't have the inherent problems with other software.

Just a heads up--I've run into it once already, where a Vista installed drive was resized and would no longer boot

 

Just out of curiosity, will FDisk still work?

 

sure, provided you can access your drive with it, meaning you have a floppy drive of some type or fdisk on a bootable media

 

I still have it on the floppy I made years ago, but the 1651 doesn't have a floppy drive. Someone has a thread on making a USB stick bootable, I'm going to look into that.

 

Basically, I received my laptop with Vista installed as intended. What I wanted to do however was re-partition it so I could put some media (e.g. pictures, movies, MP3s) on a partition separated from the OS.

Is there an approved and/or documented method to do this safely?

Thanks!

 

I used system rescue cd to partition mine and I didn't have any problems. Maybe get the latest version?

 

You can find info here how to make bootable CD's, floppy's, and flash drives:


http://bootdisk.com/