Am I going mad?
 

Hi,

I've recently acquired SuSE Professional 9.3 as a magazine cover DVD and want to install it to run alongside Windows 2000. Unfortunately my machine is too old to boot from a DVD although it will boot from a CD.

Having read the text files on the DVD it was soon obvious that I need to make a set of boot floppies and for people like me running Windows it was advised that we should use Rawrite. I've used this program before when installing Redhat a few years ago so I went in search of the program only to find that it was not on the DVD. The only alternative offered was to make a set of boot disks using an installed Linux system which of course a newbie to Linux would not have! Is this serious advice to Windows users wanting to try out SuSE? Tell me I am wrong!

Hopefully I have missed something obvious to more experienced users and there is a way to create boot floppies from within Windows/DOS. But if that is not the case how do I proceed to make a set of boot floppies? Also once they are made will they boot me into the SuSE installer or is there something else that I will need to do to get the installer up and running?

Thanks for any help.

Alan

If it can boot from a CD, and can read a DVD, then there's no reason it shouldn't be able to boot from a DVD. The filesystem's exactly the same.

Dave

I'd suggest you take a look at opensuse.org. They have the newest version 10.0 and there are a number of options for downloading for free. You can get a DVD iso file, a series of 5 CD iso files, or a smallish CD iso file, you still have to burn to a CD, which installs from the web. 10.1 is in beta but perhaps you should wait until its released -- learning a new distro while testing it can be more than you want to do.

RAWRITE:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/opensuse/distribut...ource/dosutils

BOOT FLOPPY IMAGES:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/linux/suse/ftp.sus...10.0/bootdisks

A BOOT CD:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/opensuse/distribut.../boot/boot.iso

It's a bit strange that OpenSuse offers rawwrite but not the images and Novell/SUSE the images but not rawwrite.
I suggest to use the boot CD, rather than the floppies.

ilikejam... actually that isn't true.

I have an older computer(P4 1.5) with even older drives. A 16x DVD and a 40x16 CD burner... The DVD drive will boot CDs but not DVDs because of the age of the drive. It may be the firmware, and to be honest I have never really cared enough to delve in, I just used CDs. But my guess is that age of the drive is the problem, wether a solution is there or not, I would say probably yes, but I haven't looked into it.

I would use a boot CD, not floppies as well, unless you look into it and find a newer firmware for your drive, or a bios update, or something maybe.

Thanks for the responses. I have another computer which is more up to date and it can boot the DVD so I will install onto this machine. However, I am still very surprised at SuSE for not including the Rawrite program on the DVD after recommending that it be used!

Regards, Alan

Boot Floppies from DVD images
 

I have been creating boot floppies using YAST on SUSE 10.0 and have a couple of pointers.

1. YAST says there are 8 boot floppies, although I could only create 7 (with the links here to the floppy images it would suggest there are in fact only 7).

2. I had lots of trouble with the CD. It seems that when I inserted the CD it was mounted, but YAST was then not able to see it? The only way I got around this after lots of messing about was to open 'my computer' and eject the cd, then run Yast and when it went to get the floppy image, the ejected CD drawer would close and it would find the image.

So it was laborious but I seem to have it done now, accepting there are actually only 7 boot floppies and not the 8 SUSE 10 suggests there are!!

I also have an old PC (an IBM PCserver 315 Pentium Pro) that I wish to install linux on - and it is too old to read the iso cds hence the need for boot floppies.

Any comment or suggestions welcome!!

Ps. The linkl

A BOOT CD:
ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/opensuse/distribut.../boot/boot.iso

does not seem to be working any more.. .

http://btmgr.webframe.org/

now you can boot anything...regardless of firmware, buggy bioses, or stupid oses that dont play nicely with other oses.

From the Smart BootManager website:

-----
Ext2 filesystem driver. not done
Linux kernel loader. not done
-----

Could be problematic.

Suse 10 Floppy Boot Disk Hell.......
 

........yes I am in hell.

I have laboriously created the boot floppys (earlier in this post) and when it asks for the second boot floppy, it announces 'this is not boot floppy disk number 2' and refuses to have anything to do with it.

I have double checked creating it properly, even from another Suse 10 PC, also downloading and using images from this thread - nothing. The same thing.

what am I doing wrong? :confused:

double check that disk 2 is actually bootdisk2 ... i would single out disk 2 ... redownload the image from the mirror and rewrite that disk. if it still doesnt work try another mirror.

smbr boots boot loaders not oses, oh maybe new features in a newer version. just install it to the mbr and then install lilo/grub to hda1. i have used it for years and never had a problem i think i started using it in 1999.

Suse 10 Boot disk 2 at last
 

Hello

I downloaded the image again and tried copying to a fresh floppy and this appears to have worked ok. I then got the same problem with disk 3, then 4 etc! It seems all the images on the SUSE 10 Cd are wrong?

Don't know what SMBR mentioned here is but sounds very useful, being a complete noob, how easy is it to locate and use this utility?

the images on the cd probably arent wrong but if you are having trouble writting them, try downloading new ones from a mirror.

smbr is pretty easy just download the version for your os windows or linux ... run the executable and install it to the mbr. been awhile since i installed it but something like.

smbr -d /dev/hda # would install it to the mbr of hda --- there is a man file or readme with more info. windows sees the partition names differently so its kinda weird in windows i think its like smbr -d 0:001 or something like that if you are in windows. you could just install it to a floppy too, then boot from the floppy and start the cd from the smbr menu there.

then when you reboot you get a menu asking you what you want to boot like cd, floppy, mbr, previous mbr, or a partition.

its independent of the os so it doesnt care what filesystem you use it just boots the boot loader for the os. so on my pc i boot smbr and then it boots grub if i pick the hdd, or a cd if i pick cd, and my pcs bios cant boot cds.