Hey there!

Ok, here's what I've been playin around with and just cannot seem to get it:

I've recently procured an older laptop that has a floppy and cdrom drive, the problem is the cdrom doesn't boot (BiOS is old) and the floppy/cdrom are in the same bay (swappable) so I can't boot one and use the other (ideal I'm sure).

So now I'm doin my best to do some sorta network install, but the sucky part is that my pcmcia NIC isn't getting recognized by any of distro's boot floppies. I went with good old slack first, no go. Then Mandy, and it seemed to get it, then at the last second, nothing. RH, SuSE all the same.

Anyway, so here's what I've tried:
Grab blank.img from a mandrake mirror. This is a blank bootable image that you make your own kernel for, great! So I did just that, but then, I cannot copy my new kernel to the disk after dd'ing the image because it's not a readable filesystem? I tried mounting it up with fat32, ext2/3, and even gave NTFS and reiser a run, nothing. So I can't "copy" anything to it.

If anyone has ANY ideas on how to get this thing to a point where I can do a network install of anything, (Gentoo seems easiest) I'd be very happy to hear your suggestions.

Thank you!

Cool

Download Mu or Basic and install it to a tiny partition? Then download Gentoo or whatever and go from there? Your larger distros may have dropped support for old stuff that the micros might still contain, being intended for old boxes. Not sure if they support PCMCIA, but some distro like that.

Not sure about the dd issues. Maybe partition and format the drive with tomsrtbt and try Mandrake again? Kinda shooting in the dark here, but those are some thoughts.

Sorry if I blow your zero reply if somebody else has better, but I'm sure you'll get more replies, anyway.

-- Wait - or just make a boot floppy and jump start the CD install with that. Right? boot: mount root=/dev/hdc or whatever?

Thanks for the reply!

The problem with jumpstarting the boot with a floppy and then going to CD is that the floppy and CD share the same bay, it's 1 OR the other, not both. And the BIOS doesn't support boot CD, so that really limits it to just floppy. The next problem is/was that my NIC is PCMCIA, so I need support for both my nic and the pcmcia system.

The same goes for pretty much any other options like that.

I have successfully made some boot disks that will boot Slackware up to the point of installing packages, however the kernel(s) on the boot disk(s) don't seem to have the necessary module for my card. It's a Belkin F5D5020 which uses "pcnet_cs" as the module. I figured I could make my own kernel and copy it to the boot disk using Mandrakes "empty.img" but the instructions for that are too vague. They say "copy your kernel to the floppy" and that's after using dd to create the image on the floppy. However, the image doesn't seem to be a valid (or known) filesystem in linux or windoze, so I can't mount the disk afterwards to "copy" the kernel over.

Anyway, I'll keep pluggin away, Thanks for the ideas!

Cool

This sounds (somewhat) similar to the problems I had installing on an all scsi system, with the CD on a symbios adapter and the harddrives on another. If you could use both your boot floppy and the CD at the same time, I think "jump starting" the CD install might work (they aren't hotswappable are they?). If you can get the harddrives partitioned, you can do about the the same thing there however. I used Gentoo to partition, then slackware rescue disk and utility network disk to get the network up. I then ftpped the essential packages and the slackware install disk (color.img) over, with color.img dd'ed into a partition (say /dev/sda1). I could then jumpstart the install process with the boot disk as digiot suggested (root=/dev/sda1). If you cannot get the pcmia card working yet, if you can get the disk partitioned, you should be able to dd even a rescue disk to a small partition, and use lilo to set the harddrive up to boot. All from floppy. Swap in your CD, boot from harddrive (the floppy image), and it should be all downhill from here.

I think once you get the sweet sight of the root prompt when booting from harddrive, you'll be set. I hope my explanation is not too convoluted or full of assumptions and might get you on the right track. I'm sure this problem is lickable.

Thanks! I think I am more and more understanding what you guys mean, but I don't think I am able to do it. I'll see what I can pull off and report back. The tunnel looks mighty dark, but that's likely due to that huge diesel in my way

Cool

Re-reading these threads I still couldn't do it. Then by re-reading these threads I still go nowhere. Finally by re-reading these threads it sunk through my thick skull

Ok, so here's what I did, and I'd like to note that I'm not done yet, but running through the installer as I type is definitely great news

I plopped in some slack boot disks (specifically bare.i and rootdisks install.1 and install.2) and got it to a command prompt (your were surely right on just get me a prompt I'll be happy ).

Once there I created 3 partitions (my hd is ~800mb) one very small (~6mb) which became my root partition and the bootable one (marked bootable by fdisk). I then created the second one which became my swap (I've only got 32MB RAM) and the last one being ~750MB was going to be my future / partition (once is all said and done).

I wrapped it all up by plopping in a boot disk from Knoppix and typing:
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hda3 (the very small 6mb partition from above marked bootable).

Rebooted, swapped out the floppy for the CDROM, dropped in the Knoppix CD and booted up. All worked! Well, except networking which was a MUST...

So, back to the drawing board, sorta. I now had me a skeleton idea of what to do (all thanks to the above posts, truly a HUGE thank you!) so I tinkered with other boot disks and distros (I would have used slack but it takes 3 floppies? I still can't work out how I could actually have sussed that out..) and have finally figured out an easy way. I'm using Mandrake with my PowerPack suite I won from Affero! I dd'd the image from the install CD's onto a floppy, dropped back in the slack floppies, got to a command prompt, dd'd the floppy image to the /dev/hda3 as described above, rebooted, swapped floppy with CD, plopped in the Mandy PP install CD, and am now happily installing (slowly I might add ) Mandrake 9.0 PP

If everyone goes well, I'll hopefully be running linux on that bad boy by the end of the night (day for me ).

Woohoo!!!

Thanks again guys!

Cool

I'm assuming you used losetup and the loop device to mount the blank.img? Would look like this:

losetup /dev/loop0 blank.img
mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/tmp
#add new kernel to appropriate location in /mnt/tmp
umount /mnt/tmp
losetup -d /dev/loop0

Whoa? Say what? I am not quite sure I'm familiar with losetup?

I don't think that's quite what I did, instead I:
booted into a bash prompt using the slack disks, dd'd the mandrake cdrom.img to /dev/hda3, used fdisk to flip the boot switch to /dev/hda3, rebooted, slapped in the Mandy CD and installed it.

I just checked the man page on losetup, and I'm still not quite sure how that would have helped me?

If you could clarify that a bit, that'd be great!

Cool

<gonna edit this, not sure I was clear enough about it...>

It sounded to me like you were wanting to replace the kernel and/or add a module or two to a boot floppy image, perhaps I misunderstood your problem. I just did what sounds like a rather similar install of Slack9 on an old notebook that has no cdrom via nfs with a wireless pcmcia card that was not "natively" supported (atmel).

here's what's on the bare.i for slack 9:
[root@Thinkpad local]# losetup /dev/loop0 bare.i
[root@Thinkpad local]# mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/floppy
[root@Thinkpad local]# cd /mnt/floppy
[root@Thinkpad floppy]# ls -l
total 1328
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 36222 Mar 17 23:39 config*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 653 Mar 17 23:39 f1.txt*
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root root 7836 Mar 17 23:39 ldlinux.sys*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1083 Mar 17 23:39 message.txt*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 387 Mar 17 23:39 syslinux.cfg*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 140106 Mar 17 23:39 System.map.gz*
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1171332 Mar 17 23:39 vmlinuz*

I realize you were trying for a Mandrake install, the following refers to slack, but you can adapt it.

the trick is to compile a kernel that still fits on the floppy, replacing config, System.map.gz and vmlinuz, although it's quite possible all that you might have needed was to remove a few modules from the pcmcia.dsk and add the one you need to support your card, this is what I had to do.

If you do an losetup of the slack9 pcmcia.dsk, you'll find a lib/modules/2.4.20/kernel/drivers/net/pcmcia dir, which I cleaned out and put my pcmf502rd.o module into. (you'll need another machine on your network running the same kernel/gcc to compile your module and/or kernel on, obviously.)

when you finish adding/editing/deleting things from the mounted loop device, unmount it, then dd if=/dev/loop0 of=new_pcmcia.dsk, or, you can skip saving it to hard-disk and simply dd if=/dev/loop0 of=/dev/fd0. I'm sorry about not being more clear in the previous post, hopefully this will help to clarify what I was talking about.

ps: whatever happened to the slackware bareapm.i bootdisk? it seems gone in 9.0.

AHhh! I see, thanks for the excellent info!

The major problem I continually seemed to run into was actually mounting the floppy images, I couldn't seem to find the filesystem that was on the disk (until long after I had found an alternate route ). I was actually hoping for a slack install, However I've now trimmed Mandy down to a slim (fat compared to a slim slack ) mean machine. I'm still twidding with the PCMCIA bit, but at least I've got a distro on there to twiddle with it with

Thanks for the info though! Great stuff!

Cool

Shouldn't you have made some extra disks, drivers disks, to go along with the boot & root disk? Then maybe found the pcmcia drivers for the nic.

Just a thought!

Yeah, I did that too, but they were all a no go. Seems like I've got some obscure chipset, I'm currently going through a few kernel recompiles to see if I can get it working. I'm applying the latest PCMCIA version to the kernel as well to see if that helps, and of course following a few of the how-to's I dug up.

Fun stuff

Cool

Yes, I also attempted to mount the floppy images, I got the same error message, and thus eventually was introduced to losetup and the loop device, pretty handy stuff, let's see windows do that!

Ok, I just dorked the setup to see if I could toss Slack on there instead of Mandy. So far it's a big fat, nope. Mainly because of the rootdisk1 and 2. I don't seem to have losetup on my floppy images with a bare.i/rootdisk1/rootdisk2 setup. I wish I did, I think that would exactly what I'd need to do in order to drop this ball...

Ok, here's where I'm at:
I have the 3 boot disks; I boot up with all 3, at the first bash prompt I get afterwards I drop back in the first boot disk and:
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/dev/hda3
/dev/hda3 is my bootable partition. Now if/when I restart it sees hda3 boots it as if it were the first boot floppy and then prompts me for the other 2. If I could simply dd them into /dev/hda3 sequentially (or whatever) so that the laptop would boot /dev/hda3 as if it were the 3 boot disks, then I could start out with my CDROM in the bay and everything would be peachy.

So then I thought:
Well I'll mount each floppy up and copy the data to a directory, dd that directory to /dev/hda3 and that should do it. Well rootdisk1 and rootdisk2 don't seem to have an actual filesystem on them, or not one that is easily discovered. So now I'm at a point where I can mount the initial boot floppy:
mount -t umsdos /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
And copy that data:
mkdir /mnt/booter
cp -a /mnt/floppy /mnt/booter
And dd the info into /dev/hda3 but that puts me no closer than before since I can't also get the data from rootdisk 1 and 2.

Any ideas?

Cool

Is it possible to load in all bootdisks and dd the ramdrive? It's just another device/file, right? So 'dd if=/dev/rd of=/dev/hda3' or whatever? No real idea what I'm talking about or even exactly what your problem is but it just occurred to me. *shrug*