hi....
i'm trying to install linux on really old machine
36mg ram, 75Mhz..
this comp has cdrom but i can't find bios menu for
booting media(hard/cdrom/floppy).. actually it doesn't say anything about cdrom in bios(cmos) setting.
the bios is 1992's . i suspect that this comp might not be able to boot with cdrom?

any directions?
thank you in advance

nope. I highly highly doubt anything that old can boot from cdrom.. which distro u using? can u post some more info?

i'm trying to install redhat7.1
well, that's about all informations i got for this computer..

by the way,this comp has window nt on it now,
i'm wondering how previous owner installed NT without help of cdrom?

might be a workaround somewhere?

your pc is not too old for linux.
i hope your pc has an option to boot from cdrom and if has not then you need to boot from flopy which is in every pc.
you need only 1 new dos formatted floppy(no bad sectors). start your winnt and insert redhat cd1 in cd-rom .
open the folder "dosutils"
then double click on"rawrite.exe"
it will ask you for a image give it the path like this X:\images\boot.imag (X=your cdrom drive)
then boot from floppy and at one point it will ask you to install from cd-rom or harddrive.
good luck.

Your pc is NOT too old for linux. Use a floppy boot disk to get the cdrom. not that hard.

And get Slackware, RedHat is too heavy.

If you can get a little bit more memory, it can help too.

(I have a P120 Running Slack 8.0 with 72 Meg Ram without problem. Several server on it, very cool

its always a good experience to run linux on low resources.
we can observe the real power of this OS.
and no doubt slackware rocks i love it

I have a P120/72MB/2.1GB laptop that runs Mandrake 8.2, very nicely thank you. RedHat should work well enough on your P75 machine.

I started out with Linux (an earlier Mandrake distro, actually) on my old P-B that did not boot from the CD-ROM, either. There should be boot image files on your install CD (the CD can be read in Windoze, BTW) that can be written to a floppy. Please note that these images are written with a utility, not copied. The floppy is then used as the initial boot medium and the software on the floppy then starts your CD drive and kicks in the Linux installer on your install CD.

The reality is that while it won't be impossible to run any Linux distro on your machine, it would be wise to invest in some upgrades. That old P-B that I had? I still have it, even though it's not my prime machine at home, it is an experiment machine that has an Evergreen 180 processor enhancement and 64 MB of RAM. It is still fully capable of running Linux or Windoze and has been nothing but rock solid, limited only by its BIOS which is no longer upgradeable (without replacing the BIOS chip -- not worth the expense) after P-B's demise.