OStatic

By Jesse Babson on Jun. 17, 2009

Dave - by Presto I assume you are meaning something that will bypass a heavy-duty OS boot and boot into something light and usable? Well, you can try the Knoppix Linux distro (http://knoppix.org or http://ostatic.com/knoppix). You can basically get Knoppix on a USB drive, boot into that (assuming your BIOS lets you do that - or boot into a Knoppix CD) and you can be up-and-running immediately.

Is this what you were looking for?

By Dave Smith on Jun. 28, 2009

Thanks - knoppix requires a bit more processing power then my current PC has at this time.

Giving Ubuntu a try -my problem was that my Laptop/Bios could not see the hard drive. I heard spinrite might be able to fix this issue but I have only a 4 GB flash drive and could not set it up to work with spinrite for some reason.

By Craig Harris on Jun. 28, 2009

I've actually had better success with Fedora recognizing older hardware than Ubuntu. I recently installed Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) and it didn't detect my generic on-board video (it was a server machine with no external video card) so my resolution was horrible (800x640). Fedora seemed to perform much better. I used Fedora 10, but 11 is out now (Leonidas). Something you might want to keep in mind.

@Jesse - I have been meaning to check out Knoppix. Thanks for the reco.