Running a dead hard drive

Puppy is so amazingly fast because there is no disk accessing - the whole thing runs from RAM. Beats me how they have managed to cram so much functionality into such a small package, though I guess the other small distros recommended here are equally capable.

 

EasyBCD is just an alternative way to get Puppy available at boot that does not require fiddling about with disks and boots ten times faster than booting with a disk. Whether you use disks or EasyBCD you can then easily create a bootable flash from the Puppy menus. That was your original wish if you can think back that far :-D

 

Puppy & Porteus Linux ISO worked fine on my working computer but failed to boot my dead computer.
It is a Dell Optiplex 210L running Windows XP Profesional.
I reset the COSMOS setting to the correct date and time and made sure the boot sequence was set to Onboard or USB CD ROM Drive.

With the Puppy or Porteus CD I get a No boot device available error message upon booting up.

I checked all the cables to make sure they were connected. Is there anything else that has to be checked or settings checked?

 

Could be the drive itself. Do you know that it was working before this XP system failed to boot? Also you could create a Puppy bootable flash and try with that. However as it doesn't boot from hdd either it's looking like a motherboard failure.

 

I couldn't boot up puppy with the CD but it did when I made a bootable flash.

Sorry that I was so hasty when it didn't boot. It's working fine now.

 

Duff drive then. Hopefully you can now access the hard drive.

 

You have me completely baffled. What is duff drive?