Thread: NLTDR missing
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  #13  
Old 08-05-2011, 03:02 PM
Frank Frank is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2009
Posts: 9
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Toshiba A35 hardware is not proprietary. I have an A35 and have upgraded the HDD twice.

NTLDR is the boot loader. This tells the OS where to load from. If you have multiple OSes you can configure the NTLDR to point to different OSes.

I believe the key to bring up boot options during the POST (Power On Self Test) is F10. From here you would change to where ever your boot media is installed (e.g. USB, CD, HDD, Network.)

If you want an easy way to create a bootable USB drive with linux on it I highly recommend LiLi USB Creator which can be found here:

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

With this utility you can easily try different versions of linux without wasting multiple CDs. If this is your first time with Linux I recommend either Fedora or Ubuntu variants as they are fairly easy to configure and the support for them is widely available. Note, for all you fanboys out there this isn't a thread to start flaming about your favorite distro.

After linux is installed and configured you should be able to mount and format your hard drive to whatever file system you like. If you plan on installing windows back on this machine you will want to format in NTFS. Youtube has videos on how to format NTFS in linux if you want to go that route. Most distros of linux come with native partitioning support but you may need a few packages installed before you can format your NTFS drive. Packages you may need for linux to format NTFS are: gparted and ntfsprogs

So this should give you a bit to figure out so I will end my "wall of text" now.
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