you may be having hardware issues. if the internal drive is going bad you may only have a limited number of power-ups left before it becomes unrecoverable(by the time you read this it may already be too late). only you can decide on any continued experimentation based on your specific situation. hopefully you have backup(s). good luck and keep us posted on your progress!

along with the webpage LinuxMan references, please review this one also:

https://github.com/KRTirtho/spotube/issues/1817

huge thanks for the clarification and update!

good luck with the ram and happy holidays whatever/whichever is your pleasure.

went back and reread the entire thread. have an additional question for clarification. in reply number thirty-eight(38) you relate:

so that quote seems to imply that your original thread topic "Devuan 5 not Booting on 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo" is no longer accurate? what got me thinking and then rereading was wondering exactly what your optical drive could and/or couldn't do/read/write and i recalled your mention of a blank dvd and wondered if the optical drive could even do dvd media.

so...again, i rereference the same quote where you describe

and so you are using Thunar via the Devuan 5 Live DVD on the 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo?

humbly request clarification please. thanks.

ps/fyi: am also dealing with inconsistent and problematic bios and am leaning towards firmware level corruption in this particular case since there was quite a bit of unofficial bios firmware "modding" within the gaming community surrounding this particular device(back when the unit was new, but not anymore). definitely frustrating and in some cases unfixable(at least without a known-good-firmware written directly to the chip which normally requires extensive disassembly)

nevertheless, when it stops being fun...stop. imho. ymmv.

for clarification, does your mention of "goat" reference this user?

https://dev1galaxy.org/search.php?action=show_user_posts&user_id=6999

regardless, comment wherever you feel is most appropriate for your subject(s)/topic(s)

would agree with steve_v and post number fortyfour.

believe your booting issues are a result of multiple issues.

cmos battery(whichever type internally) is depleted. some machines will not even boot without proper/sufficient cmos voltage.

here is a link that should show similar cmos battery installation/location(s) but remember every machine is different location-wise.

https://www.amazon.com/BZBYCZH-Battery-Compatible-Toshiba-A7-S712/dp/B0B51NBHDR/

your description of boot messages beginning with "PXE" seem to indicate that the bios is set to check for pxe-booting(most bios have settings to turn pxe-booting off but with a depleted cmos battery any bios settings you change will be lost when the machine is off_and_disconnected_from_mains_electricity)

your swap question has several answers. if you are dual-booting with windows you will put it wherever you made space for the non-windows stuff. if you are NOT dual-booting then for spinning rust it is best to have the swap at the beginning(first partition for non-eufi machines or second partition for eufi machines, iirc) and as long as you have plenty of hdd space stay with the "ram times 2" calculation for simplicity and as a "rule_of_thumb"

hopefully this makes sense and is helpful in some fashion. good luck and continue to keep us posted on your progress.

a brief story in your local broadsheet or even something you print out and put on corkboards in the marketplaces should help in knocking the dust off of residents retired equipment and you should end up with more than you can put to use right away. if you have trouble sourcing enough locally give the forum a shout.

from the link provided in the OP:

sudo apt-get install bison coreutils curl flex gcc g++ libncurses-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev m4 make p7zip-full patch pkg-config unzip wget xxd zlib1g-dev git

you can always email Mike Banon to confirm that a clean fresh install of Devuan was used for this project(and that no "snaps" were present and/or used/utilized in this endeavour).

********************************************************************

edited to add a link to a possibly related reddit(6 years old though):

https://www.reddit.com/r/coreboot/comments/bhf96e/lenovo_g505s_good_stepbystep_guide_on_how_to/?rdt=41619

searching DDG shows multiple results using "raspberry pi 4 usb booting"(quotation marks only added for forum clarity, not used for the search)

while you are experimenting with ram you can also consider the possibility of some sort of solid-state internal storage to replace the spinning rust. if you don't care about portability then even more options are viable. wireless strength was hit and miss in those days so, again, if it doesn't need to be portable a hard line is much preferred. great to hear you are having some success in your endeavours.

@mtbvfr

grabbed a lenovo y580 laptop which has the same era internals as your dell latitude e6530 and booted daedalus liveusb. in the accessories section of the menu you should find Xfburn. it has a "Burn Image" function that writes .ISO to CDs and DVDs properly.

that being said, your 2005 Toshiba Tecra A7 Intel Centrino Duo machine with 512MB of ram will not perform enjoyably and/or satisfactorily with the vast majority of current *nix/bsd/etc. distributions. if the machine won't boot from usb media and you don't want to burn through a bunch of cd/dvd disks(harder to find and more expensive these days), probably the best course of action is to learn how to physically remove the hard drive and use a usb adapter to properly format, partition, and install some lightweight stuff so you can both achieve some success and gain some valuable experience, insight, and troubleshooting acumen.

current lightweight offerings include distros like FreeDOS, Puppy Linux, Slitaz, Tiny Core Linux, and the like.

hopefully this helps. keep us posted on your progress.