boot from HDD

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

newbie here. trying to gain more knowledge on linux. not completely clueless about stuff. CCNA certified. anyways.

i got this old busted laptop, a toshiba 1800-S203. for some reason i always got a blank screen when choosing the installation option after booting from cd-rom (opensuse10.3 and 11). tried different options, no acpi, safe settings, edd=disable, text mode. always blank screen. the cds wont pass a medium check from this laptop but will pass on any other machine. long story short. i took out the whopping 14GB hdd and installed it in another laptop and installed openSUSE11 from there successfully. then placed the drive back into the original laptop. when i boot up this laptop i get a blank screen, so i use a boot cd with boot managing tools and boot to the linux partition and come to the openSUSE startup screen. good so far. when i choose to startup i can never get past “waiting for device /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-SATA_TOSHIBA…”
then i am thrown to “exiting to /bin/sh” prompt.

how can i get this hdd to boot on this laptop?

#2

You have to edit those device paths in /boot/grub/menu.lst and /etc/fstab. You could fix it quickly by changing those to /dev/sd?? (you have to work out the disk and partition letters) and then work out what the device path is later by looking in /dev/disk/by-id/ after it has come up.

#3

what commands whould i use from /bin/sh prompt?

#4

Depends on what text editor you know and what’s available. Hopefully something like nano is available on the rescue CD.

#5

very new to all of this, exactly what do you mean by text editor? like notepad or something else?

#6

also can i use the installation cd to rescue the system?

#7

Yes, if you can boot the installation system and access the repair system (hopefully it works again in 11.0) that would be best. I thought you couldn’t boot off the CD on the target system?

#8

yeah i cant boot off of it for some reason. everytime it loads the linux kernal i get an error decompressing linux err 1 or 2. thing it is the cd/dvd drive. so i need to do this manually.