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Spent 6 hours trying to get a 1998 laptop to boot from a USB stick
I picked up an old IBM ThinkPad 380XD at a garage sale a few weeks back. It works fine with Windows 98 installed, but I wanted to put Linux on it just to mess around. I figured I would use a USB stick since I don't have any floppy drives that work. Turns out this thing's BIOS is from the stone age and barely recognizes USB at all. After trying three different boot tools and reading a forum post from 2007 that someone still replied to last year, I finally got it to work by using a special setting in PLOP. The whole process took about 6 hours of rebooting and cursing. Has anyone else fought with old hardware that refuses to boot from modern drives?
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robin_campbell3614d ago
Honestly I gotta push back a little here. Ngl that ThinkPad is from 1998 so of course it's gonna fight you on USB booting. Tbh you should've just burned a CD-RW and booted from the optical drive instead. Those old laptops hate USB but they almost always work with a burned disc. I've messed with a bunch of old Toshibas and Dells from that era and CD booting saves you hours every time. PLOP is cool but it adds another layer of hassle that just isn't worth it for a quick tinkering session.
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