Fujitsu B2630 - Possible to install Ubuntu?

[kathleenhenri]

A couple of older Fujitsu B2630 laptops have come into my life. Neither have an OS installed on them and early research would imply that they won't boot from a DVD or USB drive. Other than removing the hard-drive and connecting it to another computer and installing the OS that way, is there another way to do it?

[ajgreeny]

A couple of older Fujitsu B2630 laptops have come into my life. Neither have an OS installed on them and early research would imply that they won't boot from a DVD or USB drive. Other than removing the hard-drive and connecting it to another computer and installing the OS that way, is there another way to do it?
Are you sure they will not boot from the CD drive? That seems very unusual for any computer, unless the system hardware is broken in some way. Look in the BIOS to see if you can change the boot device order, not all older laptops had a boot order key at switch on, eg F2, which could be what you are looking for without success.

[kathleenhenri]

Thanks for your reply. I don't actually have the laptops in my hands yet. But I was researching on line and somewhere ran across a snippet that mentioned the bios not giving the option to boot from an external CD drive. Not booting from USB, I can understand. Most older computers do not have that option.

I'll report back once I pick them up and check the bios boot order and see if it's possible to boot from an external drive..

[YesWeCan]

Which OS are you thinking of installing? With only 256MB of RAM and a rather slow uP, Ubuntu may not be the best choice. I have a Fujitsu Lifebook S-4546 and I could not install Ubuntu 9.04 on it; the install ground to a halt. In the end I opted for Puppy linux which works fine.

[kathleenhenri]

I would like to try something light such as DSL - But I might also try something like Peppermint OS. Have to check out it's minimum requirements.

I had an old Sony laptop that ran Intrepid pretty well so that might work on the B2630.

UPDATE: Further research clearly implies that this model will only boot from the internal hard drive or floppy drive. So it looks like removing the hard drive and temporarily connecting it to another computer is the only way to go. (I had great luck installing 8.10 on an old Fujitsu LT C500 that way).