New HP dv6 laptop and Knoppix

[Michael Nolin]

The laptop I bought the kids for Christmas arrived and it did not boot windoz 7. After an hour and a half on the phone with HP tech support I got a case# and an order number for a new hard drive due to arrive on the 17. HP's diagnostics test 'hard drive:failed'.  

The BIOS on this laptop seems pretty weak: F2 'run system diagnostics' RETURN run windows normally. I had to remove the hard drive from the laptop to get the knoppix CD to run, I tried 5.0, 5.1 and finally 6.01 which worked.

Perhaps I can upgrade the BIOS when I get a working hard drive? can I find a similar discussion in the archives? I checked last months but cannot remember any particular discussion.

I did not originally intend to dual boot this laptop but now I fear this weak BIOS (if it is actually the BIOS I'm looking at) will lead to certain data loss or removing the hard drive to recover any data which will have to be done on another machine. 

I have another HP dv5 I ordered from newegg, I'm quited happy with the way it has been preforming since May running  openSUSE
mnolin at linux-lap:/etc/sysconfig/network> uname -a
Linux linux-lap 2.6.27.29-0.1-default #1 SMP 2009-08-15 17:53:59 +0200 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux  openSUSE 11.1 (x86_64)

If the new hard drive does not just work, I'll be forced to spend another hour on the phone with HP to get a RMA#.

Mike