Hi everybody. I hope this forum is worth its salt. The last one I tried only flamed the hard questions and never gave any useful answers.

FWIW, while not new, I still consider myself a rookie at Linux, and you can see that I am a greenpea on this forum.

I digress. I think my question is easy.

I have an IBM Thinkpad 600E that I LOVE. Believe it or not, it kicks butt on XP, but I want more. I think you know what I mean.

Now, rumor has it (here) that Fedora Core 3 does not have the infamous sound chip problem that every distro in history has had with this computer. Thus, I will use that distro instead of trying the zillions of fixes on the web that I'm probably not good enough to mess with anyway. I know Fedora is kind of bloated and unwieldy, but I can get it trimmed down with time as I learn more.

The problem is that the CDROM drive in my computer recently died ( dang it!). I have a great external USB DVDROM that I would love to use. The problem is that I can't boot to a USB device with this computer. I have an excellent internal LS120 drive for the computer, so a bootable floppy would be optimal.

Is this possible?

TIA

Possible? Off course... Easy? Maybe... Depends.

Ok here is what you have to do. I never done it, but I understand the theory behind it. It's called jumpstarting a CDROM Funny as it sounds it is not far from the truth.

Get a couple of bootdisks from some other distro. LEt me just check if fedora comes with images for a jumpstart floppy. Ok I looked through all the CDs (including RESCUE) and they don't seem to contain a boot floppy image. You will probably have to get one somewhere else. I can put it on my webserver if you'd like. A Slackware one.

What you should do then is boot from a boot floppy. Start a root floppy and from there, mount the first CD-rom and install of it. This is all that I know how to do. I never really jumpstarted an install, so this would be new for me.

Any less n00bish guys out there know, how you can start an installation, once you've mounted a CD from a root floppy?

Hope this helps. Searching in Google produces some results too. So check in that.

And Just off the record: LQ RULES!!!

Maybe I'll just wait until I can afford a new drive

How about this:

Is it possible to copy the install data from the USB CDROM (while in another OS) onto a partition on the hard drive, boot from that partition or (more likely) a floppy, and start the installation from there?

...or something resembling that procedure?

Yes this is possible. You can make an ISO image of the CDrom. Boot from a floppy. You will again need a boot disk from some distro. Or you can search the web for a floppy distro of some kind - there are plenty.

Once you boot from the floppy, you just mount the ISO image file like you would any other partition. There should be tutorials on this on the web. See Google for them, or LQ even.

Good luck!

Google schmoogle. I've been jumping thru my butthole looking for a boot disk image pointlessly here. Just put that slackware image on your web server like you offered and give me a link to it. BTW, does the kernel on the slackware rescue floppy have loopback enabled? I will need it to mount the iso's. If it doesn't, then I will need somebody better than me to recompile the kernel with loopback enabled.

Thanks heaps for everything!

You can create a boot disk using your LS120 and the bootdisk.img on the Fedora 1st install CD. However, I am not positive if the installer will load the USB drivers so you can read the CDs from the USB drive. If that doesn't work you can install using the hard drive method (still using the LS120 boot disk). The caveat is the ISO files need to be saved to an ext2/3 or FAT32 filesystem.

OK, I have put a bootdisk and an install rootdisk on my webserver. http://um-sd06-210-1.uni-mb.si/files

You wil notice them as bootdisk rootdisks and network_rootdisk. These are all zip files. I also put rawrite program, for writing the images to floppy. It is called rawrite.zip

Good luck!

OK, this is getting out of hand. My question is simple.

Has anyone ever seen a boot disk that will get a USB CD-ROM up and running for me to install FC3 from the CD's (not my first choice)?

OR

I have seen redhat boot disks that will prompt for the location and name of the iso's and mount them for installation automatically. This is preferred, as I have the images on a FAT32 partition, but they are not burned to CD. My heart's desire is for a boot disk that will prompt me for a path to the iso's and begin the installation from there, just like it apparently was in the old days but updated to work with FC3. I do have the FC3 disk 1 burnt, and it has no boot disk image on it anywhere, despite what michaelk said.

If either of these disks exists, please tell me where I can get an image to make a disk from. I have googled myself into a state of dementia looking for anything resembling this.

I don't think I'm asking for much here.

I tried the slack disk, but I must be doing something wrong. I can't (or don't know how to) mount the iso's and get started by using it.

You said redhat bootdisks work for you? I can put redhat bootdsisk from RH9 on my webserver, for you to use. LEt me just check if RH9 comes with images for bootdisks.

Ok here goes. I have put on my webserver the two following images. As the readme explains:

bootdisk.img - primary boot image for all install methods
drvblock.img - Supplemental Block Device Drivers

I guess these are what you need. I have packed them with zip and named them images_fedora.zip. You can find them at the same address as above.

Good luck again!



P.S.

My server will be down for maintenance from now, until 2 hours. Sorry for that...

Maybe I'm in over my head here.

The slack and RH boot disks both bring me to a boot: prompt. Since I have no media, hitting enter to continue simply reports a failed boot and prompts for a different disk.

BTW, thanks for all the help.

----------------------------------------------------

Back a few hours later...

The problem is the computer. The slackware boot disk fails. The RH9 boot disk fails. So I decided to try HAL91, an entire distribution on one floppy...

BOOT STILL FAILS!

I thought maybe the disks were being fussy over my using an LS120 on the IDE bus instead of an actual floppy drive, so I tried my external floppy. Still nothing.

New info. New thoughts? Maybe there is something I need to pass to the kernel at boot: time?