antique pc/won't see cdrom drive

geden · 11-30-2004, 07:31 PM

Hi All,
I was given an old pentium1 pc and was going to put LM10.1 on it...but this thing doesn't even recognize the cdrom drive till after boot. I made a boot disk on floppy with rawrite with the cdrom image as per Mandrakes instructions but the system still hadn't recognized the cdrom.
How would you suggest I persue this little problem. I tried making a bootdisk with rawrite but when it came time to hand off to the cdrom it said it wasn't there. Any help is appreciated.

ankscorek · 11-30-2004, 07:34 PM

i guess u will have to re-compile your kernel

u have to load the old filesystems options in your kernel

J.W. · 11-30-2004, 11:48 PM

Have you gone into BIOS to verify if the CD appears as an option in the boot sequence? If so, move it up to the top of the list and you should be able to boot off the CD. That may not be the issue but it's something to check -- J.W.

michaelk · 12-01-2004, 07:07 AM

The PC probably can not boot from CDROM.

The CDROM is probably not ATAPI compliant or is connected with one of the several proprietary interfaces of the times.

In addition a Pentium PC does not have the horse power nor probably the RAM to run Mandrake 10 (min 128MB for desktop). I suggest Slackware which has a boot disk for CDROM drives with old proprietary interfaces.

geden · 12-03-2004, 04:29 AM

I was going to use this as a wireless router/firewall and it should be big enough for that I think but the problem still remains in how to use the cd files to install. I've tried rawrite with the cdrom.img to try to tell it where the install image file is but again, it just blows right by it on boot up even though the cdrom is selectable in bios (have it selected right after the floppy drive) any other ideas?