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I am feeling very stupid. I cannot boot from CD, I cannot boot from USB and I have no OS installed on the laptop.

Backstory: This computer is old. I couldn't boot from usb or cd, but wanted to install a new OS. I modified my xp boot using plopboot in order to boot from usb and install arch Linux, i've installed it a million times. The partitioning failed and I could not delete the partitions without rebooting since they were still responding to the kernel. When I rebooted I could not access the archiso anymore.

Condition:

-Mobo has No UEFI
-when trying to boot to cd it says: "reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" (live cd's I tried are verified working with a 64bit UEFI computer)
-it is a laptop

what i have at my disposal :

intel UNDI, PXE-2.0 (build 002)
a floppy drive
an ATAPI CDROM drive & 3 usb ports
a restrictive american megatrends v2.54 bios setup utility

things I have tried

-adjusting boot order / booting from cd (gives aforementioned error) and usb
-changing the IDE of the primary slave to cd-rom
-at least 3 live cds in desperation

Really at this point any sort of help you can give me would be appreciated. This turned from a hopeful opportunity to a resource intensive pit very very fast.

Please forgive the formatting. Was not aware I had to make breaks ..;

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  • Some guesswork: 1. Check if booting from cd is enabled in the BIOS and 2. alter the boot priority to boot from CD first. The BIOS could get stuck on booting from HD first and failing there. 3. Use CDs, not DVDs and no rewritable CDs. 4. Try to burn the live CD at a lower speed (typically < 52 speed). Last resort and off-topic: 5. Buy a SSD with the same interface and size as your laptop's HDD. Use any computer to pre-install any (mini) Linux distro on the SSD and try it on your old laptop (replacing the HDD) and be amazed by the speed of your "old" laptop!
    – agtoever
    Jun 15, 2016 at 18:41

1 Answer 1

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PXE boot into whatever you want, do whatever you want (fix the partition, erase it, reinstall etc.), all of that with Serva. (I'm related to Serva development)

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