downloaded the new suse 12.1, and for some reason my laptop cannot boot from dvd…yet i’ve already installed 11.4 before hand on this laptop via a dvd. i looked in the BIOS settings and couldn’t see dvd drive there.
what the hell!? any ideas anyone?
ps - it’s not the dvd i’ve burned, as it works on another laptop.
cheers
edit - is there a way to get it so i can boot from the USB stick, but install onto the hard disk on the laptop?? the instructions on the opensuse website seems like it’s to let you boot from a USB disk as a more permanent option?
So, there is the possibility the CD/DVD optical drive has died or that it is full of dust and needs to be blasted out with compressed air and if a desktop, even checking its internal connections can’t hurt. For using a USB thumb or pen drive, check out my blog on the subject here:
hi and thanks for the reply. i thought i’d replied but obviously not!
the drive works fine as i can still read/write to cds and dvds, but it just won’t boot from a dvd oddly. as said, i installed suse 11.4 so it can do it, and the disc i’m trying to use worked fine on a friends laptop so i’m stumped as to why my laptop has decided it doesn’t like it.
So, to be able to boot from a CD/DVD, the CD or DVD must be bootable, but in addition, your BIOS must be set to boot a CD or DVD before your hard drive and often, buy default, this is not the case. Its the same issue with USB Thumb drives as well. In your BIOS setup, basically you need for your hard drive to be last in boot order and if you don’t know what its set for, you must look and do not take it for granted.
it’s hard to explain what i mean but there doesn’t appear to be an option for a non-usb cd drive to be bootable…i’ll see if i can take some pictures from my phone and upload them.
Some general comments, which might not be relevant to your case.
I have an older Toshiba laptop. I have installed several versions of openSUSE, up through 11.4, booting with DVD.
I possibly could have installed 12.1 that way, but it’s a bit iffy. I put in a DVD (or a CD), I reboot, and I hold down the “C” key (for CD/DVD boot on Toshiba. And it tells me that there is no bootable media found. So I boot Windows, and it can read the DVD or CD. Then I try again. Same problem. Maybe about one try in 4, I can get it to boot.
I am putting this down to hardware failure of the DVD device. I suspect something like that is happening on your system.
My alternative is to install with USB. The one difficulty is that the BIOS has no support for booting from a USB. Fortunately, I was able to use PLOP boot manager for that. I installed PLOP to start from the Windows boot menu, as described in the PLOP documentation. It turned out that I had to use the PLOP key sequence for USB 1 compatibility mode, though the computer does have USB 2. In any case, I was able to install 12.1 that way.
Yes, I could replace the DVD drive. But this is an old computer that has passed its prime of life, so I don’t want to invest in it. I am using it only as a test box at present.