[nmglug] Another curious conundrum

[Lee Einer]

Again, thanks to all who helped me recently with the partition issue on
my laptop.

I recently received a junker Compaq Prolinea 575 PC as a donation. I was
going to refurb it and give it out (it has a peewee hard drive and only
48 meg of ram, but I figure Zenlive will work on it) but I cannot get it
to boot from the CDROM.

You would think that all one has to do is change the boot order in the
Bios, no? Well on this PC, the CMOS chip was so rinkydink that there was
not room on it for the bios, so they put a bios partition on the hard
drive. At some point, probably when the previous owner upgraded the hard
drive or the OS, that partition was eliminated. So, no bios. This beast
will not even remember the date and time.

I tried loading SmartBootManager, but this also does not detect the
CDROM. Any suggestions as to how I can get this thing to boot from the
hard drive?

Lee