Xubuntu install option fried my laptop?

[kevin1162]

Hi,

I found this ancient toshiba laptop that had win95 installed and i wanted to see if i could install Xubuntu on it.

Quickly realized that the bios didn't support booting from the CD-rom. While in windows i inserted the install cd and a menu popped up asking me what i wanted to do. I selected the first option 'Demo and full installation' then selected the 'help me boot from cd' option on the next screen.

After the boot loader program installed i rebooted with the cd in the drive... But nothing happened, nothing on the screen at all.

Now the laptop doesn't boot, nothing is displayed at inital power on. I can't boot from the floppy now (could before) either so it really feels like i'm boned here.

I took the hard drive out to put it in another laptop, but of course the connector wasn't the same... I've taken everything out and tried to boot (floppy, cd-rom, HDD) but the same thing happens.

Laptop is a Toshiba Satellie Pro 420CDT
1 GB HDD
40MB ram
it's a real power house :)

Any advice?

[lisati]

I'm thinking aloud here, without necessarily have a solution. 40MB doesn't sound a lot of RAM. I'm not sure what the minimum recommended is with Xubuntu but with some other of the Ubuntu family of distros, the minimum recommended is somewhere around 384MB ram.

[kevin1162]

oh i know...

the alternate install needs much less ram... i was going to try this before damn small linux since i'm more familiar with ubuntu. Unfortunately it's not looking like i'm going to have a chance to try DSL.

*Edit/Update*

I'm looking at some kind of hardware failure... Put the harddrive in another laptop, it's not detected. a boot disk doesn't detect it to format it. Put in a new hard drive, still nothing, still can't boot from floppy or get anything on the screen. I think it's just coincidence that it happened after trying to install Xubuntu.

I inherited this thing and thought it would be hilarious to make it do something usefull @ 12 years old (that's like 150 in computer years right?). At this point i'm just chucking it, more PC's in the heap to mess with :)

[Valsum]

Xubuntu would need at least 150 Mb to run, anyway.