My Dell Inspiron Makes a Good Anchor

I don’t know how many years ago now. Possibly even five years ago. I bought a Dell Inspiron 2600 laptop and it weighs about 20 pounds. Basically the biggest waste of money. I will be much smarter the next time I think about a laptop. It really would make a good anchor. Well since I don’t currently have a boat the anchor is going to wait. But here’s what has happened with it over the last couple of days.

Since the Ubuntu snafu with my desktop, I wanted to put it on my laptop, for a couple of reasons. Basically, when I bought it, it was still too slow to really run XP. I thought hey, I will install Ubuntu on the laptop and then it will run smoother and I can get used to the new OS… on all those occasions that I need to use my laptop…

So, after that night, having setup the dual boot on my computer and then re-reformatting it to just be on XP, I took the Ubuntu disk and stuck it in the laptop. It didn’t boot off the disk. Had to go into the BIOS to change the boot order. No problem. Done this a million times. It’s easy. No computer assembled by a large corporation is every easy. Ever.

Usually, in the BIOS, you just switch the boot order. In my BIOS on my laptop you actually have to disable the drive. DISABLE IT! Well, I thought, that’s weird, but okay. I disable the HD. I should also mention that there is the HD Menu and then my specific brand HD in a sub-menu below it. Well, at this point, something weird happened. Nothing would boot. It wouldn’t boot. It would load the disk and I would hit install, but it would just sit dead in the water, so to speak. So, I had had enough that night and gave up. Left it for two weeks. F Dell.

And that brings up to speed until this week. I want to bring my laptop this weekend for South Country Fair, in case I need to make tweaks to my poems, etc. I think, okay, Ubuntu doesn’t work. I will try putting XP back on for the sake of usage. I get through the first stage of the install. It reboots. And re-installs itself. Reboots. Re-installs itself. WTF?!? I am thinking. I format it, in DOS. Nothing. I check the memory and reset booting stuff. I mess around far past my capability as a nerd. Finally, I had a brilliant idea. I will go and set the BIOS back to default setting. Nothing happened. Everything is booting as before. Why isn’t this working?

I am fishing around the Ubuntu site and see Xubuntu. It’s an version for slower, older computers—like my anchor. I download, burn and pop it into my laptop. Xubuntu installs. Success! Minor, sub-story: I had to install Xubuntu three times because I kept taking the CD out at the wrong time. Ha! I was tired. End minor, sub-story. I turn off the laptop, take the CD out and restart. No operating system found. I hate you Dell! I hope you go to hell. Hehe rhyming.

Remember I mentioned that whole disabling the HD in the BIOS. But, I reset it. Remember? Remember how I reset it? Well it turns out that it didn’t reset the sub-menu and so my BIOS, all that time (including while trying to re-install XP), wasn’t booting my HD, thus not being able to an operating system. I enabled the HD. Everything works fine. I am now running Xubuntu and everything is smooth. So far.

UPDATE #1: It seems I have had quite a few people find my site because they are having the exact same problem. I am by no means an expert at this. I am more of jerry-rigger. I can just tell you what I did. No clue if it’s right.

To answer theUg’s question. Actually, I don’t know if it’s answer, but here we go. I also could not get the Ubuntu (live) disk to run. It would boot the initial junk but then it would say something like Please wait… and the screen went black and the CD and HD would spin for about 30 seconds and then nothing. Black screen of death.

However, for reasons unbeknown to me, when I put the Xubuntu disk it gave me the live desktop and I could install. It didn’t hang up. I think Ug, perhaps, you should attempt to install XP or a Windows OS. Previous to getting the Xubuntu to work I had installed XP which included an NFTS format. I really don’t know that this should matter. Two things: (1) If you can’t get XP to install maybe there is something else going on and (2) perhaps the Windows disk does something to make (X)Ubuntu to work.

After installing Xubuntu. I tried one more time to re-install Ubuntu, but it would get stuck at the same spot. So instead I talked to a friend who suggested using this in the terminal to install Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop

I haven’t worked out all the kinks with this yet. There is more information here. Not sure that I even did it right. I am a n00b when it comes to Ubuntu.