Talk:What to do when your hardware doesn't work
From Grokdoc
I've been trying to install onto a HP Pavilion zt120 laptop. So far, I can not get any CD to boot this portable except the HP recovery CD. Not even a Windows 2000 Pro install CD works. Rediculous! I think HP must have deliberatly broken the BIOS to get it to do this. NEVER EVER buy a HP Pavilion zt1230 if you care about freedom.
I found one link with another person which must have a similar HP bios. Other than that, google searches didn't turn up a thing. http://www.exit109.com/~jfraney/linux_on_pavilion_zt1170.html
"How frustrating!" I thought to myself. Surely someone else has tried this? Then I remembered the new grokdoc project and how nice it would be to have a place for people to post such experiements.
As an aside, I might recommend that the grokdoc(law) moderators make a hardware specific section that can be broken out into manufacturer and model. This would serve as a spectatular resource for people to be able to check the Linux support of hardware before they purchaced it new or used. Also, if you make this documentation available under some GPLish license then someone can package it up as /usr/doc/grokdoc/
Best wishes, Jeff (can't spell) Carr jcarr@wit.org
More on the subject of HP pavilion zt1230
More on the subject is here:
http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/syslinux/2003-January/001364.html and http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/syslinux/2003-January/001365.html is the response from Peter Anvin.
More on the subject specific to the HP Pavilion I just found here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=80875
So, in summary, it looks like all HP Pavilion laptops models zt1xxx XTxxx need to have a BIOS update to boot Linux.
