I had an old laptop (see title) ,which worked to an extent.The cd/dvdrom always showed in bios boot section but never actually showed in boot menu when trying to use it ,so I could never use it to boot from,but it worked fine in windows playing cd/dvds etc.Anyhow after installing fresh windows 7 home and sticking a fairly light av on ,I realized that it was struggling cpu wise.Its only 1.5ghz with 2 gig of ram ,and reviews mention the lack of performance for this particular model.So i decided to chuck mint17.3 on.Because i couldn't boot from the cd drive ,and the toshiba bios only seemed to cater for harddrive,FDD,CD,and LAN boot options not USB.I decided to take out the harddrive and stick it in a usb enclosure ,so it was essentially then an external hardrive.I then connected this to my desktop pc wiped it ,and run mint from live cd in the desktop cdrom.I then installed mint from my desktops cdrom to the toshiba harddrive.All well and good except during the mint installation it detects hardware ,but would i be right in saying that its detecting hardware from the desktop machine?.I then put the hardrive back in the laptop and booted up mint.It detected everything in the laptop hardware wise and runs beautifully....except the cd rom is not recognised at all or showing.Ive run terminal commands and used hwinfo ,but it doesn't seem to mention the cd drive at all.Is this because there's no drivers for it or because i installed mint from a "proxy" pc ,and it wasnt able to detect the cdrom from the laptop?. tia
Can you try an older Mint live CD? Newer kernels may have dropped support for older devices. Just a guess though. Mint 13 is an LTS release fully supported until april 2017.
Thanks for the reply... Ive decided to just stay with mint 17.3 and forget about using the cdrom.The reasons for this are because there seems to be something intrinsically wrong between the cd/dvdrom and the bios,and I now dont think its a driver issue.The laptop originally had vista on it ,and when checking the bios version ,it states it was for xp and vista and didn't mention windows 7 which is what was running on it prior to mint.I don't know why the bios shows the cd rom fine but boot selection (F12) does not.Since installing mint it runs great ,and all usbs and card reader are recognized so I can do without the cdrom.
The BIOS doesn't touch the OS. You can install Windows 7 on a 20 years old computer if it has the proper hardware requirements. After checking all components (POST), the BIOS will contact the HardDrive and make it read the MBR, where the OS bootcode is located. Then the OS is initialized.
