I have an old machine that is driving me crazy,
it will boot from cd but any cd that uses isolinux to boot will not work, because isolinux removes the floppy emulation for cd boot, and the cd-rom on this machine
due to bios limitations will only boot with floppy emulation. The last version of a live distro I could find that would boot was knoppix 3.3 and that iso is not available, my copy of knoppix 3.3 is fubarred, I did find miniknoppix 2.0 which is 3.3 based but it does not include much of the software, and an apt get will not install anything because dependancies are not met and because the system is so closely integrated I can't upgrade core components.
So after that failure I get debian boot floppies and put them on disk, Well after several days of trying to install from floppy (installer kept freezing when downloading, never at the same download or same stage) I finally get it installed but grub is installed as the boot loader, and on next boot I get grub error 18 the root partition and boot partition are out of range, I then go to the debian floppies again and boot into rescue mode, well it turns out my root floppy seems to be going bad all ready because it starts spitting I/O errors at me; I manage after a couple boots to actually boot the installer in rescue mode, and it freezes get it rebooted again, and I get to rescue. So I apt-get lilo to the hard disk install I create a lilo.conf file, run lilo to overwrite the the MBR and replace GRUB, now I get "LI 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99 99...." Lilo booted this computer fine when knoppix was HD install with almost identical partition scheme (Debian /usr is on a seperate SCSI HD, knoppix only allows one partition install, well at least with the 3.3 installer.)

So I am begging if anyone know of a debian based resue disk, or installer disk of recent origin with the syslinux floppy emulation to boot it I will owe you eternal gratitude. Mainly I do not want to dpend hours on end again trying to get the system installed from floppies again.

Notes: UBCD is isolinux all vurrent live distros I tried use isolinux, debian installer CD uses isolinux.

I saw your other thread about this issue. You get random errors and lockups, this usually means hardware has gone bad.

The harddrive is brand new as is the NIC, the prcessor mainboard and floppy are original, but the only floppy that gives me a problem is the root floppy, and when miniknoppix 2.0 was installed on the harddrive it ran fine, so I don't think it's the processors or RAM, Although I admit the RAM is used, but it also does pass the RAM check from the bios at startup, It seems like the install freezes at download because the download stalls, and doesn't resume, the box is hardly frozen I can open another console and use the CLI. I don't know it's just giving me headaches, I think I screwed up the lilo.conf for the install and thats whats giving me the LI 99 99 error. Well aside from no one I guess having a syslinux cd-rom install disk, does anyone know what the lilo configuration should look like? I think I need to change the root from the hard drive partition to the initrd-img, because I know from previous experience installing linux on Old world macs that the 2.6 kernel needs to boot from an initial RAM disk due to certain checks it makes. Well if I manage to get the rescue disk to boot again and I fix the problem I will let everyone know the solution to hopefully help others in the future.

I reinstalled the whole system and repartitioned, all works well now, except for shutting down from an X session but that's another thread. The isntall wasn't so bad this time around, even from floppy.