[PLUG] Laptop issues

[Denis Heidtmann]

The need is for a laptop to run an HP S20 slide scanner, using Windows 95 or
98, since that scanner has no Linux support.  I have tried in the past using
Windows 2K under VirtualBox, but that did not work.  It used to work when I
was dual-booting to Windows ME.

I recently received an HP Pavilion ze5375us with Ubuntu installed. (Thanks
Russell).  He said that he had to try 2-3 times to get it to boot from the
CD to do the install, but got it done.  Now the CD does not seem to work.
 The bios is very sparce, but it shows that it had a CD.  Ubuntu shows it
has a CD, but can tell me little about it.  wodim --devices tells me that
the drive is /dev/scd0, but nothing more.  This machine has a floppy!, so I
booted to a Windows 98 startup disk to see what it would say about the CD.
 It could not read it either. The message from the floppy said "some drives
require special drivers", and I saw some comments on the web about the CD on
this laptop failing due to driver issues.  So this could be a hardware or a
SW issue.  I took the drive out and gave it a cursory inspection--relatively
dust-free.  No dice.

So my questions:  Are there suggestions as to what to do next with this
laptop, or would it be better to look for one with a functioning CD and save
my energy for less frustrating tasks?  This is cosmetically a very clean
laptop, but not of use to me without a CD.

Thanks for reading this far.

-Denis