I have good news and I have bad news for you.

The bad news is that the use of the upgrade command probably broke your SliTaz beyond any easy kind of repair. The reason why this happened is because the packaging system has been changed, with many other parts that also got upgraded, added or modified in some way. Because of all of these factors, Cooking and Stable just aren't very compatible and a direct upgrade from the one to the other tends to break them.

I do however have some good news. It may be possible to boot off a usb device even if your bios doesn't support by using something called SBM (Smart Boot Manager) which you can get here: http://paulski.com/zpages.php?id=1612
The great thing about it is that you just put it on a 1.44 diskette and use it to boot other devices attached to your system like HDDs, CD/DVD Drives and USB devices.

So give it a try. I'm sorry to say I have no experience with using SliTaz off a usb device, but hopefully somebody that has can give you some pointers in that regard. There is also a guide on it in the docs @ http://doc.slitaz.org/en:guides:liveusb - Hopefully combining SBM and a liveusb version will solve your problem.

Anyway, Good luck and hope to see back on SliTaz soon!

thanks for your reply :),
i will try to do your proposition in a moment, and will keep the thread updated about it :)

Kindest Regards
Stephanie

oh my! my floppy has failed me.....

but i still have one tiny hope: the LAN,
not through my wireless (its LED lights only turn on AFTER having booted to slitaz)
but through the wired Ethernet.

I have a DLINK DIR-300 router,
but the problem is that it's unable to recquire a DHCP address,
it says :
MAC Address 00.00...........
GUID:..............
dhcp....../

then after a few seconds it says:
"no DHCP or proxy DHCP offers were received,
exiting intel PXE..."
then we're back to square zero...

Note that i don't mind formatting the whole system (i don't have any valuable data on it yet, it's just the packages which i can redownload and install later...)

Kindest Regards
Stephanie

I'm a bit puzzeled.
Your CD-Drive as well as your Floppy-Drive failed you ?

Can you as a first step make sure that your BIOS is setup correctly and the boot sequenze is something like:
1. Floppy-Disk
2. CD/DVD-Drive
3. USB-Media (if available)
4. Harddisk

Insert a bootable media in each unit and start the laptop to see what's happening.

If really nothing works, you couls try to setup a PXE server on a seperate machine.
-> http://doc.slitaz.org/en:guides:pxe

Rgds

OldGuy, thanks for your reply :)

actually, in a desperate attempt to make my cd-reader work, i wiped the lens of it with a brush (since it's a laptop, the lens is expelled with the cd lid)
not too cautious, i know, i might have scratched it, but it did the trick.

and for the PXE server info, thanks for the link, i'll bookmark it in case -god forbid- my cd reader fails me again

so, @Trixar_za and @OldGuy ,
thank you both for your help :)

Kind Regards
Stephanie

Update:

After my cd reader erroneously worked this time,I started by installing Lubuntu, since Digikam is what I wanted in the first place, but it can't be installed on slitaz.

now my cd reader has stopped working (again!), but only on startup:
when I'm in UBUNTU, it can easily read cds on it!

so now I have this Lubuntu-which-is-not-light-enough-for-my-laptop operating system that i would very happily trade back to slitaz now.

I tried to do the PXE method, but it seems to me (from the google cache of the link @OldGuy has given me) that it relies on booting first from CD, or floppy...
Still, my cd-reader couldn't open the CD on boot, even with the burnt 700 KB slitaz-boot on it !!

So I figured to make slitaz boot from iso within the hardisk through GRUB2 that came along with LUbuntu.

[....]

February 13th 2011  

EDIT: Post moved as a new thread since it's another topic. But one remaining problem from this topic is that my cd-reader can not read cds on boot

@florastephanie:
About you're initial question: maybe the situation is not so problematic. Having no mouse/no keyboard is symptomatic of stable>cooking upgrade; even if problem pointed by Trixar_za **may** happens (until there, I havn't heard about someone who broke entirely his system doing such upgrade), there's no clue this was which happens to you. Problem you're describing can be easily explained: stable xorg use mouse/keyboard drivers, while cooking use evdev which is missing from you're system, while in cooking xorg disable mouse/keyboard drivers by default.

To install evdev:
Start SliTaz (cooking) in terminal mode
At grub screen, edit the cooking entry (type 'e') and add to the first line:
screen=text
Confirm (type 'ENTER') and boot (type 'b').

At terminal login prompt, log as root and install evdev driver using:
$ tazpkg get-install xorg-xf86-input-evdev

Then reboot:
$ reboot

Boot as usual and check if all looks fine for you :)

PS: please spread the word if other people fall into the same problem ;)

This grub2(installed to usbkey MBR) isoboots /boot/slitaz/slitaz-3.0.iso on same usbkey:

menuentry "SliTaz-3.0.iso" {
loopback loop /boot/slitaz/slitaz-3.0.iso
linux16 (loop)/boot/bzImage
initrd16 (loop)/boot/rootfs.gz autologin
}

@Gokhlayeh,

@mojo ,Thank you for your reply.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I understand that your method relies on plugging the usb on boot and allowing grub2 to run from it?
If it's the case, then I don't think it would work:
my laptop dates back to pre-2001 (toshiba Satellite 1800 )
it has no bios entry to boot from USB,
it can only see the usb from within the operating system.


Anyway, I have posted a new thread concerning this issue (so that I don't dilute the initial thread)and allow me to repost your post on that new thread
Kindest Regards
Stephanie

Actually, there was several threads about SliTaz stable breaking when a direction upgrade is made through tazpkg to cooking. Mostly involving X.org or other driver based devices/software breaking afterwards. So since this was the case, I assumed that it was also the cause of this problem. It may also be caused by the move to udev in cooking. Stable still wants to use HAL fully while cooking wants to use udev more which effectively breaks the newly upgraded SliTaz's hardware detection.

Just thought I should mention that :P

PS: I did convert over the debian package of geeqie, but it tends to break when loading directories with pictures in with an out of bounds error. I get the exact same error with Nitrogen. Then again, my SliTaz is heavily modified.