[PLUG] Laptop issues

[Jason Barnett]

Did you happen to copy down the model number of the CD drive while you had
it out?  Might help to figure out what kind of drivers it may need.
Also, I stumbled across the service manual for this series of notebooks,
here <http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c00246219.pdf> is the link in
case you are interested.

Jason

On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 8:37 PM, Denis Heidtmann
<denis.heidtmann at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
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