Q: Does anyone know of a linux distro that you can run off of a CD and also write to the hard drive on the computer? I have used knoppix before but the version I used couldn’t write to the hard drive on the desktop.
A. You can write to the hard drive using any live CD distro.
1. Find out where the respective hard drive gets automounted. Open the drive and check the address bar of Konqueror if using KDE or location bar if using Nautilus. The address bar will show something like /media/harddisk1 etc.
2. Open Konsole or Terminal.
3. Type su – root and enter the root password (usually live CDs won’t have a root password.)
4. At the # prompt, type ‘umount -v /media/harddisk’
5. Again at the # prompt, type ‘mount -vw /dev/hda1 /media/harddisk1′
6. You should be able to open ‘/media/harddisk1′ in any filemanager and be able to write to it.
1. Find out where the respective hard drive gets automounted. Open the drive and check the address bar of Konqueror if using KDE or location bar if using Nautilus. The address bar will show something like /media/harddisk1 etc.
2. Open Konsole or Terminal.
3. Type su – root and enter the root password (usually live CDs won’t have a root password.)
4. At the # prompt, type ‘umount -v /media/harddisk’
5. Again at the # prompt, type ‘mount -vw /dev/hda1 /media/harddisk1′
6. You should be able to open ‘/media/harddisk1′ in any filemanager and be able to write to it.
IF THE DRIVE YOU ARE WRITING TO USES NTFS FILESYSTEM, DO THE FOLLOWING:
Make sure you have NTFS Progs installed.
Instead of step 5 shown above, do the following:
At the # prompt, type ‘ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt’
Now the NTFS Partition mounted at /mnt should be writable.
Please note: /dev/hda1 is one representation of the hard drive. hda is the naming convention used for IDE drives. So /dev/hda1 represents first partition of 1st hard drive. /dev/hdb3 represents 3rd partition of 2nd hard drive (‘b’) and so on.
If you have a SCSI or SATA drive, the naming convention would be ‘/dev/sda’ with the same numbering scheme.
How do I change the BIOS to boot from CD?
Q: I am using Windows XP and am changing to linux. I have a distro CD, and need to change BIOS so that I can boot from CD. PLease help.
I have tried inserting CD and re-booting, but it doesn’t work.
I have tried inserting CD and re-booting, but it doesn’t work.
A. Open up your bios by pressing, in most cases, f2 at the start up screen(What key is pressed depends on the manufacturer, but in most cases it is F2). Loook for an option that changes the boot order. Where this is located depends on the bios settings. There will either be an option to change a boot order, (i.e. Floppy drive, CD Drive, Hard Drive). Most bios defaults have hard drive as the last setting, which explains why many people get an "invalid boot disk" message at start up. As long as the disk is in the drive before the computer is booted up and the CD-Drive is set to boot before the hard drive, you shouldn’t have a problem.
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