Ted Roche-2 wrote:
On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Mike Cloaked mike.cloaked@gmail.com wrote:
why would a computer with a failed SATA hard drive be unable to boot from a liveDVD in the optical drive?
Perhaps the machine's BIOS was not configured to boot from the optical drive.
No - what I have done for a long time is set it to boot from HD but when starting the boot process, like many machines you can hit F12 and select which device to boot from - that is how I do many processes like partitioning etc....
In fact with no alteration in the BIOS settings at all - once the new HD was in place I interrupted the boot with F12 and selected the optical drive to start PartedMagic from the liveDVD - exactly this process worked once the new drive was in place where it failed to do so with the dead HD in place - that is something I never experienced before.
Clearly whatever had failed in the drive did something really bad to the system so that booting from the other drive would not work - that was why it was such as nasty failure - and led me to believe that it was more than just a bad HD - maybe others have had something similar?
Anyway f11 is now running on the machine in question and it is doing its long yum update as I write this...