First off, let me begin by saying I’m a complete computer idiot. I have an eMachines t4130 that had Windows XP on it and it didn’t work very well. On the advice of a friend, I installed opensuse 10.3 on my computer. The problems I had before went away (good) but I am way over my head as to how to use linux (bad). I can’t do anything on my own except open simple applications like OpenOffice and Firefox. What I’d really like to do is go back to XP. I have an installation disk for it but when I restart the computer it doesn’t boot from the cd. What do I do?
P.S. - Please save the comments about why would I want to go back to XP! I know I’m an idiot. I just want to go back to what I’m familiar with! :\
As soon as your PC starts to boot, and things start to appear on the screen, it will show you which key to press to enter SETUP. It could be DEL, F2, F12. It should tell you at the top or bottom of the screen.
Once you are in the SETUP or BIOS (Basic Input Output System) as we call it, find the settings to tell the machine which order to load Boot Devices. Set it to boot from the CDRom before booting from the Hard Disk. Save and exit.
If your XP disk is in the drive, it will access it and normally will popup some text telling you to Press Any Key To Boot From CDRom.
By the way, there is nothing wrong with wanting to go back to what you are familiar with. Linux is not for everyone. It can have quite a learning curve.
Thanks for responding. I was in school and never looked back here. Sooo, two years later, I dug my machine out of the basement and dusted it off. If you’re still around and willing, I’d like to continue. There are two optical drives physically installed. According to the ribbon cables inside, the MASTER is Samsung CD-Master 48E, the SLAVE is Samsung CD-RW / DVD Drive SM 308. In the BIOS boot order, it lists the CD-RW/DVD first, then REMOVABLE drive, then HD. (The CD-Master 48E is not shown at all.) Either way, I put the installation disk in the drive, shutdown the computer, power on the computer, the cd drive light flashes a few times and then opensuse starts up. I have tried doing this in both drives and with different installation discs.
Ok here is the problem 10.3 is no longer supported. That means you can not get patch fixes or drivers for 10.3. The current version is now 11.4. The world passed you by while your computer slept.
To reinstall XP you must have the boot set to a working CD/DVD player. Try putting the disk into the other drive.
Going back to your original post, your friend should ideally offer you a bit of support along with advice to install openSUSE… I’d suggest going back to your friend and asking for help or finding someone else you know who will be willing to help 1 to 1. (You could try to find a local Linux User Group.)
Further to that, consider before re-installing XP that it is about as out of date as openSUSE 10.3… Also, you posted that it was causing you problems that 10.3 fixed. So if you can find someone to help you, you might want to give some thought to installing openSUSE 11.4. I know you’re concerned about not knowing what you’re doing but I think you’ll find that over the past couple of years the quality and quantity of documentation and guides for beginner users has improved greatly. Just try Googling opensuse perfect desktop or similar searches for tutorials etc.
My wife (who is a big Microsoft fan) still likes to use winXP, although she is evaluating windows7. She currently has her PC setup with a tri-boot between openSUSE-11.3, winXP and windows7. Upon booting she is presented with a GNU/Linux Grub boot manager choice of those 3 operating systems. She makes her choice and the computer boots to her selected operating system.
Of course to install all 3 operating systems, it was essential that the BIOS in the PC was configured to 1st boot to the CD/DVD drive, and then if there is no bootable CD/DVD in the CD/DVD drive, to then boot to the hard drive.
Also, in order to install winXP it was necessary for my wife to identify the partition in which winXP was to be placed and to then make that partition an active boot partition. There are free programs (such as gparted in GNU/Linux) that one can do in order to make that active boot. One can even download liveCDs (such as parted magic and gparted-live-cd) which will boot GNU/Linux from CD, and allow one to change the active boot hard drive partition.
Now if you merge the entire hard drive into one partion for winXP then there is no difficulty/complexity with active boot partition selection, as only that one partition can be the active boot partition. BUT if your PC has more than one partition, you will need to either make your chosen partition (for winXP boot) the active boot partition, or merge all the partitions to one. I can not recall if winXP has the feature to merge all partitions to one for its installation.
I do know that when my wife first tried to install winXP in a dedicated partition (sda1) the installation failed upon the 1st reboot, because that partition had not been flagged as the active boot partition, and she ended up with a PC that would not boot at all (which was easily repairable with a liveCD if one knows the method - but if one does not know, it can be frustrating).
I have tried putting the disk in the other drive. That didn’t help. Click HEREfor shots of my BIOS screens. Maybe that would help. The photos are numbered but appear in reverse order. They are named in the right order and have descriptions for each.
Update(?): I downloaded XP setup floppy disks from MS. Computer still doesn’t boot from DVD, but will boot from floppies… BUT when I start I get to disk #2 (there’s 6) and I get the following error:
File
tkrmlmp.exe could not be loaded.
The error code is 7.
At that point, I am forced to end setup.
I read online that memory can sometimes be tricky. The computer came with two sticks totaling 1 GB of RAM, I added two more sticks at some point. Should I remove these?
If I were You I would disable the quickboot option in the bios (screenshot 5) than You should see which key You need to press in order to make a boot menu pop up. I think that if from that pop up menu You would choose the CD it would boot from the CD.
IMHO your problem is that the CD drive is too slow to read the CD before it tries the second option in boot order. I’ve seen this happen on my PCs numerous times. Choosing the CD from the pop up boot menu solved the problem for me unless the CD was broken.
It seems to be an AMI BIOS, on my netbook with AMI it’s the escape key that gives the boot device selection option, I guess it’s the same on this machine.
[QUOTE=glistwan;2340730]If I were You I would disable the quickboot option in the bios (screenshot 5) than You should see which key You need to press in order to make a boot menu pop up. I think that if from that pop up menu You would choose the CD it would boot from the CD.
**I tried this and it had no effect.
IMHO your problem is that the CD drive is too slow to read the CD before it tries the second option in boot order. I’ve seen this happen on my PCs numerous times. Choosing the CD from the pop up boot menu solved the problem for me unless the CD was broken.
** Would it be worth it to find a faster CD drive?
