CF 27 HDD died - Help

i have a cf27 and it used to work, but the rubish 6.3Gb hdd gave up last thursday and now im stuck. i could reinstall xp or 2000, but i dont have a CD drive for it. (and i dont want to buy one either) and im open to things like ubunbu too..

Sugestions?

Thanks

 

If the 27 allows booting from USB, you could always transfer XP or 2K to a thumbdrive on another pc, mark it as active and use that as your install media.

 

You are stuck, a usb install will require at least a floppy drive. Unbuntu will not boot due to the Pre-1999 bios on the CF-27 and the lack of ram. I loaded DSL Linux via a floppy and a usb stick. I never had any luck with the linux distributions that use the later linux kernels. Even if you get a cheap usb cd/dvd drive you will still have to have a floppy drive to boot it and they can be had on ebay pretty cheaply.

 

I have a donor drive lying around that I drop into machines for testing purposes (desktops) that has ubuntu on it. You might use an adapter, hook up your new 2.5" drive to a desktop (or another lappy), load ubuntu, and swap back? ubuntu will just detect your hardware on 1st boot after being installed in the 27.

If you are using win2k, you can also place the destination drive in any machine via ide adapter or usb adapter, format it to be a bootable ( /s), copy over the i386 folder and panny drivers, reinstall the drive, boot, cd over and run setup.
I've done that lots for fujitsu point 1600's. Sometimes you have to go to disk management and set the flag to "boot"

Can a 27 boot from lan? might be worth looking into.

 

Good question, the CF-27 never came with factory lan so that is not an option in the bios. However if you add a PCMCIA lan card to the CF-27 it might then be possible to do a net install of a linux distribution that supports doing so. Debian comes to mind and I am sure that there are others. The Debian net install is small enough that if it can cope with the Pre-1999 bios limitation it might be possible to install a lightweight distribution in this manner.

However you will still need a floppy drive or a cd/dvd drive to boot the CF-27 to install anything.

Read this:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/use-a-floppy-to-boot-usb-pendrive-linux/

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/category/usb-boot-cds/

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/

Then read this:

Create your own LMDE, Part 1 - Linux Mint Community

Create your own LMDE, Part 2 - Linux Mint Community

Then look at this:

Debian -- Debian-Installer

Even though the Tutorial deals with a 64-bit operating system it is still applies to a 32 bit operating systems.

Of course I don't necessarily recommend either Debian or Linux Mint, but use them as examples of what is possible to do with Linux. You might want to check out Puppy Linux as it worked with my CF-27 Mk5. You can also goggle "small linux distributions" and see what is available to meet your needs.

Keven