[ltp] Help Needed

[skipper]

Hi All,

I have a strange problem - which I have tried to solve - so here goes. I 
had a working 600E with Linspire 5.0.59 which had a Debian core version 
2.6.10 - latest version of Linspire v6 has UBUNTU. My 600E had a 
motherboard failure.

I also have an A21E - it has no CD Drive - it has a battery as I use the 
A21E to navigate my boat. It seemed to me a "simple" matter of sticking 
the 600E's hard disk in the A21E. It worked ok - but Linspire had a few 
problems with mouse (ps/2 serial and usb) which failed to work and an 
inability to connect to my nic - there are display issues when 
Linspire's GUI loaded psychedelic. No matter how many times I ran 
redetect or diagnose - in fact Linspire's GUI eventually vanished and I 
have access via the prompt as root and Midnight Commander to get around.

I am faced with doing a reinstall - either Linspire or UBUNTU. I have 
created a UBUNTU bootable 1 gig pen drive - I have also a usb CD drive. 
Alas GRUB will not boot either one and CDs don't auto-run on my 
Linspire/Debian system as in Windows. I have also tried copying the 
contents of my Linspire CD onto the pen drive and dumping that on the 
dard disk but as of this time I've had no success in getting grub to 
boot anything up. Must be possible.

Plainly even with the latest bios update on the A21E it does not 
recognise USB devices to boot from. My LInspire CD will run 
automatically from my USB CD on a Windows machine but not my Linux. 
There must be a way to start an install either from files copied to the 
hard disk or via my USB CD. I just can't figure out the "howto." I don't 
mind installing UBUNTU over what I have as I have saved all the data or 
any other Distro that works on the A21E.

Practical thoughts would be useful because I have tried the Linspire 
UBUNTU Foruns and LinuxQuestions.org - I wonder why I left OS/2 - oh 
well.......................

Regards,

David
PS Hello Ted Frater - Kathryn and I are on a boat in Cyprus.