old bios wont boot gentoo cd

nocturnal · 04-17-2003, 12:08 PM

a friend of mine has a box he wants to put to use but it's really old and when he tries to boot with the gentoo 1.2 cd in it fails,
my thought is getting somekind of bootdisk but i'm kinda a newbie myself so if i'm right, where can i get a bootdisk?
if i'm wrong, what could i do

busbarn · 04-17-2003, 02:00 PM

is the bios set to load from cd? Also, the new rc-4 cd is supposed to have better hardware detection and stuff so that may work better.

jailbait · 04-17-2003, 03:04 PM

Many distributions come with a boot disk image on the CD. Find a computer where the gentoo CD will boot and see if you can make a boot disk from the CD.

Note that actually the CD probably has a boot disk image to create a rescue boot floppy for the system to be installed. Maybe it also has a boot disk image for accessing the CD. Or maybe it has a boot disk image that will serve either purpose.

yngwin · 04-20-2003, 05:15 AM

You want to go with a Gentoo 1.4rc, not 1.2. I suggest you go to http://forums.gentoo.org/ where you can get a lot of specific gentoo help. BTW there is no bootfloppy yet, but you can use the floppies from Slackware for example, see this howto and this thread. There is an unofficial Gentoo bootfloppy at http://home.earthlink.net/~jonfos/bootdisk.html

sjlinux · 04-22-2003, 09:44 AM

You can use a boot manager that sits in your floppy drive. I use SBM (Smart Boot Manager) located at: http://btmgr.webframe.org/index.php3?body=news.html. You put it to a floppy and reboot. A not so pretty screen will pop up, and you just arrow down to the CDROM entry, and you are there.

Nick