0

I have an acer 6310 that doesnt support usb boot. My hard drive is broken, i don't know what happened. My IDE TO USB adaptor doesn't even recognize it on my other laptop, it just died. I wanna use it as a server at home but is there another way of booting it, besides buying a new hard drive (those IDE hard drives are expensive). Thanks. It has a pcmcia port as well.

6
  • I doesn't have a DVD (or CD) drive? Jan 29, 2014 at 13:09
  • No, none of them! :( Jan 29, 2014 at 13:43
  • So what is the install medium? Even if you had a new hard drive, how would you install the OS onto it? Jan 29, 2014 at 16:49
  • 2
    $34 with free shipping from ebay for a new 60GB drive. Is $34 really THAT expensive?
    – Damon
    Jan 30, 2014 at 7:27
  • might be worth checking if its pata or sata tho
    – Journeyman Geek
    Jan 30, 2014 at 7:37

3 Answers 3

5

enter image description here

2.5 IDE to SD card adapters are fairly cheap, as are the SD cards. An 8GB SD card will comfortably hold Debian and leave a couple gigs for other things.

They're a bit problematic to attach to the inside connector on most laptops (I had to carefully use tweezers) but work great once you actually have them attached.


If you can't get your system to boot from any kind of CD or DVD, you can look into PXE booting the Debian installer (you'll need to have some files on a TFTP server for this to work, and you can use Tftpd32 on Windows for that).

One thing I did on an ancient laptop that had no working CD drive, no ability to boot via USB or PXE, is to use VMWare Player to create a VM, and I told the VM to use the SD card as its hard drive. I then ran the Debian installer in that, and then powered off the VM at the end where it requested a reboot. When I then put the SD-to-IDE adapter in the laptop, Debian came up fine. You could probably do something similar with Windows using ImageX and GImageX.

1
  • Didn't know about this, way way more cheap than an IDE drive, i don't need too much space because I'll be using that computer as a web server and to watch videos on my tv. Deffinitely giving it a try. Jan 31, 2014 at 10:10
3

Not having an internal hard disk drive is going to be a bit of a handicap. As IDE drives are generally much older than their SATA siblings (back then, few people had ever heard of a 'terabyte'), similar storage capacities can easily cost you three times as much. It may be worth looking at used disks however. With a bit of luck, you ought to find one that fits any modern OS with plenty of room to spare for about ten to twenty USD.

You can of course boot from other media. Many Linux distributions offer Live-CD or Live-DVD versions that allow you to use the OS without an HDD. A writeable medium may be preferential for more permanent use, of course. A USB drive would be easiest. Even if your pc does not support USB booting, using software such as Plop Boot Manager, perhaps from an optical drive, you can boot operating systems from USB as if it were supported. Alternatively, though more difficult to set up, you may be able to boot an OS over a network connection through PXE.

To see what boot methods are available, enter the BIOS settings and have a look at the boot configuration page. If none are to your liking, it may be possible to get support for more by installing a newer version of the BIOS. If not, I'm afraid you're out of luck.

1
  • Whoa, thank u, PXE booting. I have never used it actually, im gonna see what I can do. Jan 31, 2014 at 10:08
1

Get a IDE to Compact Flash (CF) Adapter.

enter image description here

CF interface is much like a hard drive so that chances for it being compatible are high; some CF cards literally are mini hard drives with mini platters in side, although I think most the new ones are flash memory. You can get an adapter on EBAY for $5-15 then just buy a CF card that suits your needs. With a linux distro, you can get away with a pretty small card; if you use windows you will need a much larger card.

0

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .