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ok, this is probably a really stupid question, but is there any way to have a cd install of debian if your computer bios is so old it will not let you boot from a cd? With Red Hat and Mandrake, they provide a boot floppy image that lets you get what you need from CD. I searched the Debian Website and google, but all I could find was a debian boot floppy for network installations, which isn't working for me. I would really like to TRY and install Debian, and I know the solution is probably simple, I just can't think of what it is...
Maybe I've had too much beer...
Location: a tiny place caled hendrik ido ambacht in the netherlands
Distribution: SuSE, debian, slackware, lfs
Posts: 1,358
Rep:
I'm not sure if this is going to work. But give it a try. Put a formated floppy in the slot and do dd if=/dev/hd[x] of=/dev/fd0. Here hd[x] is your cdrom device. And i'm assuming fd0 is your floppy drive. You'l get an error that there is no place left on the floppy but don't worrie about that. Put the floppy in the slot while booting and also put the cdrom in the drive.
What i'm hoping is that the boot sector of the cd rom gets copied to the floppy. The machine will get booted from the floppy but the rest of the installation will occur from the cdrom, or atleast, that's what I hope.
Schatoor - I don't know if that will work, but I'll give it a try tonight and see. Thanks for the help.
Crashmeister - I already tried that, and maybe I just screwed up or something, but the only boot floppys images I found on the debian website (I found an additional one using google) start the installation, and then try to connect to the network to download the rest of the installation. For some reason, the network installation floppy isn't getting the connection right, and crashing. Rather than try and debug it and figure out what is wrong, I just want to install from the CDs I already made.
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