I have an emachine and a gateway laptop that I would like to install suse10 on. However they both have some age on them, and the dvd refuses to boot. It scans the cd drive, then the dvd drive, and then proceeds to booting the installed os. I've messed in the bios some, but haven't found anything pertinate to booting a dvd.

I am thinking I need to make a boot disk, possibly floppy (shuddering!) to say "hey! read the dvd" but I'm not sure how to do this. Would this be the most plausible way to boot the dvd or is there something else I could/should do?

There should be a folder called /boot on your DVD. In this folder you'll find images of bootfloppies and a description how to create them. A utility for windows (rawwrite or rawwritewin) you'll find in /dosutils on the same DVD.

Hello,

afaik the commercial SuSE-DVD is a double layer DVD. Older DVD-drives have difficulties reading it.
Does the installed OS read the DVD?

Maybe you have to change the BIOS boot options. Some Bioses want the boot-priority for IDE-devices.

You can make boot-disks with the tool rawrite in /dosutils? and the disk-images in /boot?

HTH

Interesting point! If this affects only booting, you could try to create a boot CD instead of boot floppies (far more convenient). You'll find the CD image in the same folder: /boot/boot.iso.

Ooops, I just found out that this is no longer possible with the images in /boot. They seem to require a perl script under linux (mkbootdisk). However, the floppy images can still be found in the official SUSE release, e.g. ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/suse/i386/10.0/bootdisks
Sorry for the confusing info!

ok, thanks for the infos. i'll try this out when i get back home.
and yes, both fc2 on the emachine and xp on the laptop can read the dvd.