I recently picked up a Gateway 1450 Solo for a smoking deal with no OS on it. I loaded Linux Mint 9 Fluxbox on it and it works great except for the battery wont hold a charge. Anyways, i have a copy of WinXP on a disc that I want to load on to it but when I put the disc in the drive and boot it up I hear the drive spinning but then it wont boot to the installer, it just goes straight to Mint. I have verified the disc in my desktop and when I boot that up it comes up to the WinXP installer. Does anyone have any ideas on what I should do?Im thinking I may just format the HDD and start from scratch but I'd like some advice.
With the battery not holding a charge, the BIOS is probably reverting back to a boot order that has the HDD as the first boot device. You should boot to the BIOS and ensure that the first boot device is the CD drive.
Are you sure it is a good copy of XP, if you burned it, it may be bad. It is either that or the reader is not good on the drive. Those are the only thing I can think of besides the BIOS not being set correctly. Try taking out your HDD and booting from cd and see if that works.
My luck with booting to CD's on my Gateway Solo 1450 is strange.... CD's only boot when I am pushing the CD drive in (NOT the button, next to the button for instance). Do this until the CD boots, from the second the computer turns on. Otherwise it will just boot to the HD. You should see the CD LED flash a few times, then stays on, then boots to the CD. Good luck!
Flash memory can retain data without the need for a power source nowerdays. just look at SD cards and USB sticks (or android phones ) Been a long time since you could pull a CMOS battery out and reset a BIOS.
