Comments on: Installing Debian on a Dell Latitude X200

By: aaron

aaron — Sat, 24 Apr 2004 08:06:39 +0000

Thanks for the Knoppix tip also. It realy helped me.

By: Andrew Myers

Andrew Myers — Sun, 21 Dec 2003 16:22:26 +0000

kbob –

I was able to boot Knoppix on my z505s by using these options:

knoppix ide2=0×180,0×386 nopcmcia

The z505′s (well, at least the one I have, dunno if this is true of ALL of them) do a bit of weird trickery to boot off CD — at boot time, it fudges things so’s that the cdrom appears to be on a third ide interface (ide2, rather than ide0 or ide1).

Note — this only is true if you have the Sony VAIO pcmcia cdrom drive (the pcga-cd51 in my case).

If you don’t boot off CD, it works like a regular pcmcia cdrom drive.

By: kjw

kjw — Sun, 04 May 2003 01:30:55 +0000

I was able to boot my dell from CD by first using the firewire cd drive, and then switching to a pcmcia cd drive to do the actual install.

In my case, it was a sony cd drive, but shows up as a generic pcmcia removable media drive, nothing special.

By: Jim Ley

Jim Ley — Wed, 26 Mar 2003 12:39:15 +0000

Hmmm, where you at Christmas, I just dumped XP, partitioned and re-installed it. mind you I had to re-install XP anyway really as default installs of it are truly awful.

By: kbob

kbob — Tue, 11 Mar 2003 01:09:16 +0000

Thanks for the Knoppix tip. I’d tried booting Knoppix on my Sony Z505-RX (which was just as shiny and new as your Dell, about three and a half years ago (-: ), but Knoppix couldn’t see the PCMCIA CD-ROM drive.

I copied the KNOPPIX directory to the C: drive using Windows 98 (also shiny and new once) and booted the CD just as you described. It works!

This is especially helpful as I’m giving a KNOPPIX presentation at the local LUG[1] this weekend.

Thanks!

[1] http://www.euglug.org/