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Old 11-24-2011, 06:46 AM   #1
garryg68
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How can I run a boot CD from a PC that doesn’t have a BIOS CD-ROM Boot option?


I have an old laptop with an external SCSI CD-ROM attached. Unfortunately the BIOS doesn’t support booting from the CD-ROM, so I can only boot from a floppy or the hard disk, and it doesn’t support network boot ether.
This machine currently has Windows 95 loaded on it but I want to try installing some other OP/SYS.
I was thinking of trying Android PC OS, Google (chromium) OS, SKY OS, GeeXboX, or some form of low-resource-friendly Linux... possibly Puppy!
Unfortunately I have all of these as boot CDs. So are there any Linux boot-Floppy images than can be used to find the CD-Drive and kick of a boot-CD install?
 
Old 11-24-2011, 07:16 AM   #2
Pastychomper
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Try Smart Boot Manager.

Alternatively, IIRC it used to be common for Linux distros to include a bootable floppy image somewhere on the install CD, I don't know if that's done so much these days but it's worth a look.
 
Old 11-24-2011, 07:29 AM   #3
Larry Webb
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Grub legacy will fit a floppy, not sure about grub2. Legacy will boot everything except ext 4 file systems.
 
Old 11-24-2011, 08:57 AM   #4
ukiuki
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Check out Plop boot manager it offers many options, i believe it is possible to switch from your floppy to your cdroom with Plop.
Does your computer have usb? What is the configuration of your computer?

Regards

Last edited by ukiuki; 11-24-2011 at 08:58 AM. Reason: misstype
 
Old 12-31-2011, 02:58 AM   #5
sixshots
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If you can obtain DSL 4.10 Linux on usb and a DSL made bootfloppy ( made from within the DSL 4.10 OS, it's a menu entry you can select to install on floppy), you can boot and install on that machine.
The DSL distro is a little sparse in overall capability, but the above can practically boot a cinderblock. I used it on an emachine 5305 1.8ghz AMD, 512mhz ram with no HDD, no cd-rom and no bios support for booting from usb beyond floppy drive. Took abt. 10-15 minutes to boot that way as "probing" system for ehci.o file is the longest portion of the wait, once found the process flies.
These files can be downloaded freely online from damnsmalllinux website.
 
  


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