The target is an Intel Marl mobo (circa 1996) with 80 meg & 1.6 gig drive. It is in a Procomm cdrom-server that I removed the scsi cards so that I only had one problem at a time. I downloaded & burned the Ubuntu Edgy Eft 386 server version as there is an enhancement (dratted unreadable ids) unique to each drive appearing in /etc/fstab. I also downloaded tomsrtbt because there is no native support for cdrom in the BIOS. By typing in changes to /etc/fstab, I was able to ls the contents of the Ubuntu server CD.
THE PROBLEM: I don't know the incantations to convince the cdrom to autostart. I don't know how to manually create a server from the cdrom. Is there a text which would teach me these? Or can somebody describe a method?

Thanks in advance,
Diswalker

Have a look at "smart boot manager" on http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

Smart boot manager fails with "Disk error! 0xAA" repeatedly. This could be the Old Intel board, or something to do with tomsrtbt. How did people install Linux before cdroms came along, or maybe smart boot manager.

Thanks for the reply,
diswalker