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i am wanting to put zipslack on an old laptop i have dos 6.2 on it currently do i need the boot disk or will i be able to install and run zipslack without it also (using a parallel zip drive), if i need it how am i supposed to put it onto a floppy it is a floppy disk image (bootdisk.img) thanks in advance for any help i dual boot wiht win xp and mandrake 8.2 so if you know how to do it in either os thats fine
Last edited by arlothemoo; 08-20-2002 at 09:10 PM.
Since you have DOS on the thing, you can instead copy "loadlin.exe", a kernel that can find your install media (yes, you can get it to install from a parallel port zip drive!, look for a kernel with "ppa" in it), and copy the intial ramdisk (initrd) if needed to somewhere to your on your DOS file system, execute something like: "loadlin vmlinuz initrd=initrdxxx.tgz root=/dev/sda4" or whatever and avoid the whole floppy boot thing. I hate floppies!
that seems extremely complicated...once im better with most of this stuff ill try it if i need to install this way again (ive hardly bothered to use dos since the first computer ive used had win 3.1 and i cant remember anythign before that...adn im just breaking into linux) but for now ill stick with the floppies thanks a lot though i found rawrite but im waiting for tomorrow to actually do anything its kinda late
Yea sorry, I did make it a little complicated. Besides that my instructions were not very clear, partially because it will vary depending on setups & distro's.
If you have a dual boot computer anyway. Loadlin comes in handy when you are messing around with boot loaders (lilo) or installing different kernels. Sometimes you can make mistakes and end up unable to boot into Linux. With loadlin, you can jump into DOS, then run your "backup kernel" from there and boot into your Linux file system anyway.
Take care with "floppy images", the floppy disks that you put them on have to be 100% perfect. You will random error behavior if they aren't.
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