ok so i got my grandmas old laptop for free. Here are the specs

Pentium 1 @ 133Mhz
16MB Samsung RAM
2.1GB Hitachi Harddrive
CD-ROM drive & Floppy Drive (only one can be in at a time though)

Ok i went to the BIOS and told it to boot from CD-ROM drive, and it absoutly refuses to. I have another old computer that does this too (and i gave up on it).

I even tried taking the Harddrive out of it and trying to make it boot from the CD, but no luck.

Is there any way i could mabye somehow make a floppy boot disk, to make it mabye look at that, and the floppy would tell it to then look for the boot disk (on cd)?

Edit: here is a link to gateway to my exact laptop, with more detailed information on it.
http://support.gateway.com/s/Mobile/.../p2300nv.shtml

problem solved, updating the BIOS from 7.42 to 7.43 fixed it.

I appreciate that you fixed it with a BIOS upgrade, but Smart Boot Manager at URL http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr (note: no www prefix) will allow chaining from floppy or HDD boot to CD.

I run OpenSuSE 10.0 on a Toshiba Tecra 510 with a very similar spec; getting the network interface (via PCMCIA) going was a pain but otherwise it's great. This machine has the final BIOS from Toshiba but still won't boot CD so no other choice really!

I use IceWM rather than KDE by the way - KDE is just too unweildy. Worth installing though if you've enough HDD space as there are lots of great apps that will run under IceWM.

I have to say I much prefer OpenSuSE 10 to DSL having tried both.
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Good luck
Richard (MQ)