Need to boot from floppy to install from USB

thriftee · 05-29-2014, 10:57 PM

I have a laptop that is older, before they allowed booting from USB, and the CD-ROM drive no longer works, but it does have a floppy drive.

I have been able to get Debian, Manjaro, antiX and Puppy to load via plop linux and unetbootin, but I can't get Frugalware to boot from USB that way.

Frugalware does allow booting from USB, so it seems to me, that there ought to be a way to make it work.

I downloaded copies of

bootfloppy.img
bootfloppy-usb.img
bootfloppy-4.4.img
pdlfloppy.img.gz
frugal_grub.sh
frugal_usb.tar/gz

So far. I've tried the boot* ones, and they are all trying to load KNOPPIX from the looks of it, and the cfg files are not in a text format that I could just change, it doesn't look.

what {'d really like to do is to be able to do a grub boot from floppy, and just be able to put in the details for the boot into a configuration file.

Any ideas of a way to get the USB boot running?

pan64 · 05-30-2014, 01:21 AM

http://frugalware.org/docs/stable/install.html
just download the iso image and put it onto your usb. The "know-how" is described on that page.

EDDY1 · 05-30-2014, 02:51 AM

Why not do a frugal install with unetbootin & boot disk from hdd?
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/une...i/installmodes

Quote:

Hard Disk Install Mode

If you provide a LiveCD iso file, such as the Ubuntu desktop iso, to UNetbootin and use the hard disk install mode, the resulting install will NOT be a full, standard hard drive installation. Rather, you are simply booting into the live environment, the same way as if you had booted from a live CD or a live USB, except it's being loaded from your hard disk instead. This is often referred to as a "frugal install", as it doesn't install a dedicated bootloader and doesn't make a separate partition, but rather piggybacks off the existing OS's bootloader and installs the files for the live environment inside the existing partition. For details about the boot process, see How UNetbootin Works.

jefro · 05-30-2014, 03:28 PM

I think you can put plop on the hard drive rather easily from floppy.

I'd consider pxe/gpxe/ipxe instead.

Might be able to use grub or grub4dos on a floppy to boot to usb.

In all this, it might be easier to get a usb to ide enclosure to load it from a different system.

Shadow_7 · 05-31-2014, 08:20 AM

pxe booting might be the simpler route.

You should be able to put grub on a floppy. You might have to grub command mode it to boot a grub on a usb.

GRUB> insmod uhci
GRUB> insmod usb
GRUB> ls
GRUB> insmod part_msdos
GRUB> insmod ext2
GRUB> configfile (usb0a,msdos2)/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Or where ever your grub on USB is located according the output of ls on the grub CLI. You might have to insmod ohci depending on your USB chipset. And a machine that old probably need a non-pae kernel.