Jun 20, 2012

Installing Ubuntu on a Sony Z600 (no internal CD-Rom and no USB boot available)

At weekend i tried to install Ubuntu on my 11 year old notebook. A Sony Z600? It was some kind of ultrabook 11 years ago:
  • Pentium M (no wireless chipset onboard ;-)
  • Display: 1024x768
  • 384 MB RAM
  • 40 GB HDD
  • ATI Radeon Mobility (8MB)
  • 1.7 kg
  • max. power consumption 19.5V x 3.0A < 60W
  • 2 x USB, 1 x Firewire
  • Jogdial
  • external CD-Rom over PCMCIA
  • shipped with Windows 2000

There is no information from sony on the web available.

Some years ago i already installed Debian on this laptop. There are many guides out there (like this or this). But writing a floppy disk is not really option. So let's try using the CD...

But there was the first suprise:

Ubuntu 12.04 does not install on Pentium M (missing PAE feature -> link or link). So let's step back to 10.04 and the boot option ide2=0x180,0x386.

But this does not work... After booting the installation kernel from CD the kernel does not recognize the CD-Rom drive anymore. Booting via USB-CD-Rom-drive is not possible, because the notebook is far to old to boot via USB...

But then i found the magic boot option:

INSTALL_MEDIA_DEV=/dev/sda1

After adding this, the kernel boots from CD-Rom and after that it asks for the boot medium attached to one of the USB ports via USB-CD-Rom! Really nice option but installing Ubuntu 10.04 over USB version 1.1 is not really fast ;-)



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