This may help you or it may not.

Have you tried the SmartBoot Manager? It can be put on a floppy and used to pass the boot sequence on to other devices (like cdrom's) in cases where the bios doesn't support that.

You can find it here:
http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

Well, thanks. I got it to boot up though. I just got to get the ISO on the cd rite, so it will work.

dping.

I am curious.

my laptop has bootable floppy, but cdrom is not.
The problem is they go in the same slot.
Could I use smart boot manager to start boot selection process and the swap the floppy for cd.
*does this make sense???*

Thanks,
Blair

Haha. Sounds interesting .
It would depend on how SmartBoot is designed to work. If it loads itself completely into ramdisk, then you could do that. It's worth a try.

Also, if you don't mind overwriting your current bootloader, you could install SmartBoot to your hard drive. Just boot with it and when it asks if you want to "save changes" choose yes (I believe that would do it... I've never tried. Had a fellow I was helping do it once though).

I know the RIP disk has a nice tool for saving and restoring MBR's so you could make the install temporary.

DeadPenguin, You sure there's not a cord that can come from your floppy drive? I thought I had the same problem when I went about restoring windows. But, I noticed that in the side of the floppy drive, it looked a little different. I pulled on it, and it became a cord that hooks up to the side of my laptop. Haha, and most of that time i was thinking that the only hookup from the floppy was the one in the back (the one that connected in the slot my cd drive was in.) What model of laptop do you have?

Thanks.
The sbootmgr just has to work once so I can install DSL to HD on Lappy.

The Laptop is a old behemoth of a machine. It is the IBM 760el.
Someone I knew gave it to me instead of throwing it away. I figured it could at least be a dhcp server..or....something for my kid to beat on.

I wish I could just install hd in another computer,but it's got some crazy connector on it.


Best Regards,
Blair

Ok...well, it wasn't the ISO. I burned it to the cd correctly...got a gray screen with little black criss crosses...I tried perhaps copying the files from the iso to my c drive...nothing...help! What am I doing wrong? It goes through the little Linux command thing...with the little penguin? Loads all the stuff, autodetects, an configures my files...appears to work fine. Then, when the desktop SHOULD come up, there's just that gray screen....mouse won't work...I'm pretty sure this isn't how it's supposed to be...lol, something's wrong, please help....

What are your computer specks? (ram, cpu speed, etc...)

From what you say, it sounds like you may be a little underpowered for livecd mode.

166 Mhz Intel Pentium Processor (MMX)
64 Ram

It's an older computer...but, They have put this distro on much older systems...i would really like to get it to work on my lil laptop (OmniBook 5600CT). I'm so sick of Windows. Like I said earlier, my modem is hella slow, so I don't want to dedicate 4 hours to downloading a "relatively small" distro. Please help me out, if you can.

That's a pretty old one. I have DSL installed on an older laptop though , which had the same problem you describe.

You probably won't find any livecd distro's that run any better on that laptop. DSL should run fine when installed on the hard drive assuming that it detects the hardware properly. Mine performs slightly better than it did with windows.

You will have to boot into text-mode. To do that, if I remember correctly, type the following at the boot prompt:
It's one of the "boot options." Hit the F2 key at the boot prompt to double-check me.

Then once it has booted follow the instructions found here:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-hd-install.html


EDIT: Keep in mind that once it is installed it may take some tweaking to get working properly. Old laptops can be finicky that way.

Okay, I'll start workin on it. I tried creating another partition for linux, but haven't had much luck. Fips didn't work...said all the partitions were taken? Even though i have probably 1.5 gigs of free space...I'll keep tryin though.

I like to use the linux program called parted. It is included on the RIP Rescue floppy. A quick google will bring it up.

Thanks, I downloaded a program called parted, but it needed a bootdisk and another for the program...but the program isn't fitting on a floppy...Which is somewhat frustrating...Can you run the program from your hard drive when the floppy boots up?
Also, on another, related, note. I was thinkin "hey, I'll try DSL on my XP", and did too...it works, but the graphic is pretty bad...sorta like running a newer program on a MUCH older machine...like 95...the graphics are all...blah...it's confusing, because my computer is pretty nice...At first, it appeared that it was gonna do what my laptop did, which was weird...had the grey background and all that...i changed the style, but the graphics are still lookin kinda crappy...Any help? Now I'm lovin DSL, and would really like to get it to work...on both my laptop, and pc...

You can get the RIP rescue floppy [ here ]. It is a "live floppy" if-you-will, with a *very* minimal linux operating system. It has parted installed on it.

As you are noticing, the grey background at startup is normal, it comes up while the X graphics server starts.

In what way, specifically, are the graphics bad on your other machine?

dping,
Could smart boot manager be used to boot up a computer from a usb flash drive when the bios doesn't allow it?

calcon