Scenario with very old laptop Compaq Armada m700

What is the point of using 2008 distro in 2020? No point, just nothing else works with this particular laptop.

Compaq Armada m700, (20 years old laptop), 448MB ram, 160gb hdd, builtin USB 1.1, PCMCIA card USB 2.0, PCMCIA wireless card Netgear WPN511 (Atheros chipset), DVD player, no floopy.

This laptop can not boot from usb. Can not boot from DVD as this player can’t read dvd anymore. It reads just some CDs recorded on very low speed (x2 or x4)

I didn’t succeed boot with Plop. It starts booting,…and freeze, with all old distros I have, that boots normally from CD. (probably 4k sector problem)

All those lightest distros for old computers just refused to work. Elive 3 won’t start even on i5 with 8GB ram. AntiX was “successfully installed”, but he managed somehow to screw up partition table, so computer was unbootable after AntiX installation, even if did not touch MBR at all. Boot loader was installed on second linux partition. Lubuntu and LXLE requires at least 512mb ram, and their installers can’t fit on CD. It is possible to boot from something else and then continue installation from external DVD. However low RAM problem persist.

Backtrack 3 installation

Prepare 2 partitions with gparted or fdisk.

I have Windows on hda1 and hda2, so I put linux on hda3 and linux swap on hda4.

Boot into backtrack 3 live CD

Format partitions and add swap

mkfs.ext3 /dev/hda3
mkswap /dev/hda4
swapon  /dev/hda4

Mount HDD, copy files from CD, bind dynamic directories,

mkdir /mnt/backtrack
mount /dev/hda3 /mnt/backtrack
mkdir /mnt/backtrack/boot
cp --preserve -R /{bin,dev,home,pentest,root,usr,etc,lib,opt,sbin,var} /mnt/backtrack/
mkdir /mnt/backtrack/{mnt,proc,sys,tmp}
mount --bind /dev/ /mnt/backtrack/dev/
mount -t proc proc /mnt/backtrack/proc/
cp /boot/vmlinuz /mnt/backtrack/boot
chroot /mnt/backtrack/ /bin/bash

Make dual boot with Windows xp

Edit /etc/lilo.cfg

# LILO configuration file
# Start LILO global section
lba32 # Allow booting past 1024th cylinder with a recent BIOS
boot = /dev/hda
prompt
timeout = 1200
# Override dangerous defaults that rewrite the partition table:
change-rules
reset
# VESA framebuffer console @ 1024x768x256
vga = 773

# Linux bootable partition config begins
image = /boot/vmlinuz
root = /dev/hda3
label = bAcKtRaCk3
read-only
# Linux bootable partition config ends

other=/dev/hda1
label=WindowsXP
table=/dev/hda

To write to MBR start lilo

lilo -v