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I have an old Fujistu Siemens laptop that I do not want to throw away. It came with windows XP which currently are not working properly. I want to install a lightweight Linux distro on it to bring it back to life and have it available for internet browsing. The dvd drive seems to not work properly as when I put movie dvds in it doesn't play them completely. On the other hand the USB drive cannot be found from outside windows explorer (by that I mean during bootup of the laptop the usb drive does not appear in the bios or in the boot method selection screen). What other choices do I have? I am kind of low in funds and cannot purchase a new tablet or laptop.

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  • SD card if your laptop had the capacity to use SDHC card for IO purposes. Any good and compact linux distribution can be stored in SDHC (8GB or more). You will probably need to use a custom bootloader (like norton commander old stuff like that) to read SDHC cards. The reason is that I cannot remember being able to read SD card in boot mode for installing new OS. Try and see what happens.
    – ha9u63a7
    Oct 13, 2014 at 11:40
  • Also if possible, try to list (for us here) what IO devices you have access to as opposed to the ones you don't.
    – ha9u63a7
    Oct 13, 2014 at 11:40
  • When you say devices you mean ports? Well The computer has an SD port but I don't know if it supports SDHC or SDXC for that matter. USB ports exist but as I said it only works from within the OS and DVD ROM aswel. I tried using an external DVD reader but did not work either Oct 13, 2014 at 11:49
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    Can you remove the hard drive and put it in another computer that can boot from USB/DVD? You could install it using another computer, then put the drive back into the original.
    – user24925
    Oct 13, 2014 at 11:58
  • You could try booting from network. Haven't tried it myself, so I'm not sure exactly what the requirements of your laptop would be. Here's a guide on performing a Arch Linux net boot.
    – AcId
    Oct 13, 2014 at 12:07

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