Problems after hard drive swap

[bronzelycett]

First off I hope this is in the right section if not please move it where it will get the proper attention.

I recently purchased an old broken laptop (Compaq Evo N610) thinking I could fix it and give it to my Mom. It became immediately apparent the hard drive was dead. No problem I had a couple of spares in other broken laptops so I swapped one in out of an old Toshiba Satellite. I had forgotten that the Toshiba was running Ubuntu 11.10 in any case as soon as I finished the swap the computer booted up fine with a few exceptions. 1. The DVD drive does not function at all. 2. The battery is "Not present". 3. The wireless card is not recognized and does not function. I would simply reinstall the OS with a newer version of Ubuntu or even windows but I cannot get the DVD drive to function. I have win 7 in a usb stick and tried to install from there but I cannot get the system to boot from a usb stick. There has to be a simple fix to help this OS detect the hardware and find these devices. Any help greatly appreciated.

I am somewhat new to Ubuntu I have used it before but not on a daily basis. I have several other OS's ready to install and am willing to try just about anything to get this $10 laptop up and running.

[mörgæs]

Hi, welcome to the fora.
The N610 is not powerful enough for Ubuntu. I recommend a fresh install of Lubuntu 13.10.

[bronzelycett]

Thank you for your welcome fora.

A fresh install of Lubuntu 13.10 sounds great I would love to, that or Win XP that it came with. I have disks and it seems to run Ubuntu for now but as mentioned in my post I cannot get the DVD drive to work and I cannot boot from a usb drive. So? What can I do?. I assume that a fresh install of almost anything would solve nearly all of my problems but I am unable do to my other problems.

[bronzelycett]

Oh by the way the N610 is running an old but functional Pentium 4 with 2 gigs of ram.

[mörgæs]

When you say that the DVD drive does not work, do you mean that it neither works for CD's?

Here's something about booting the N610 from USB (http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-HP-ProBook-EliteBook/BIOS-supporting-quot-USB-FDD-quot-on-Evo-n610c-n620c/td-p/357464#.Ur_0go7MWXk).

You could also install a minimal ISO in the Toshiba, move the disk to the Compaq and do rest of the installation there, if everything else fails.

[bronzelycett]

As for the Toshiba it is dead and in many pieces. It got dropped a long time ago and the drop took out more than the screen. I just kept it around for parts like the hard drive. And as far as the DVD drive on the Compaq it doesn't do anything at all since I plugged in the hard drive. Its lights came on and stuff before but nothing now. When I got the Compaq home the first thing I did was try to boot it. The guy I bought it from said that just one day it wouldn't boot and he had no idea how to fix it. Of course it did not boot so I did a HDD Self-Test from the setup options. It failed so I figured the drive was to blame. I then took the drive out of the parts Toshiba i had sitting around and popped it into the Compaq. Of course I then tried to boot the computer and it booted right up to Ubuntu 11.10. I know that 11.10 worked great on that old Toshiba and recognized the optical drive and the battery. I am not sure how Ubuntu works as far as detecting the connected hardware, I have done hard drive swaps on windows computers and have never run into these kind of problems before. Anyway as soon as 11.10 booted up on the Compaq I frantically tried to remember my password I finally did and was able to log in. As soon as I did I realized there were a few problems as listed above. I figured that maybe restarting would help so I tried that. No good. I read the article above and I am still stuck I configured my usb stick as per: (http://liliputing.com/2008/04/install-windows-xp-on-mini-note-usb.html) but I still cannot find it to boot it must be something to do with the fact that the N610c is not bootable from a usb. I will keep working on it. Thanks for the info. It would even be fine if I could get Ubuntu to recognize the computer it is in.