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.

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/instal...-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.