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BTW, does the old P3 has support to boot from a cd/dvd drive? Check the bios if it supports this feature.
Yes it does. Thanks - Just a bit confused on how it will recognise this new dvd with the .iso when it would not recognise the factory pressed dvd that I got from the magazine.
Yes its the original drive. The strange thing is that I have an old knoppix live CD and it boots with no problems but it just does not seem to be able to boot from a DVD which is why I am not sure if creating an iso and burning it to another DVD will make any difference.
Don't really want to replace the drive because technically I have already replaced the PC, I just wanted to use it to have a look at other distros.
Yes its the original drive. The strange thing is that I have an old knoppix live CD and it boots with no problems but it just does not seem to be able to boot from a DVD which is why I am not sure if creating an iso and burning it to another DVD will make any difference.
Don't really want to replace the drive because technically I have already replaced the PC, I just wanted to use it to have a look at other distros.
The drive is probably a CD reader and not a DVD reader. A similar mistake
I made two years ago, I purchased a refurbished 1U rack server for $149. I assumed the drive was a combo drive. It booted a cd disc fine, but it did not boot a dvd disc. I looked at the logo on the front side and to my surprised it was just a cd reader and not a dvd reader. A simple mistake, I overlooked.
It's no use burning the iso if your original dvd didn't boot.
If you have grub installed on your hard drive, you could try this:
1. create a partition large enough to hold the contents of the iso then
copy the contents of the dvd to that partition.
you might as well create the partition that will hold the new linux
system and a swap partition
2. There must be an isolinux.cfg somewhere with entries like
label something
kernel path to somekernelname
append initrd=initrd.img some options here
you can adapt these entries to grub entries.
Let's assume the partition you've copied the contents of the iso is
the second one (if it's not, just replace accordingly)
grub starts counting from 0 so it designates this partition by
hd0,1 (hd0 for first disk and 1 for 2nd partition)
The grub entry then is
title something
root (hd0,1)
kernel path to somekernelname all the options of the 'append' above
initrd initrd.img
reboot
select one of the installation entries
after the system has finished booting launch the setup program if it
doesn't start automatically
There should be a prompt somewhere in the installation program that
lets you select the source of the installation programs (cd-rom, partition, ...)
select the partition where you copied the dvd
...
If you don't have grub, it should be possible to do that with lilo
but I don't use lilo
The other alternative is to create a bootable usb stick (with syslinux
for instance), copy the initial files that the dvd uses to boot
and store the contents of the dvd in a dedicated partition of your hard drive
And yes you can boot usb with plop
(if you have an old pc you must have a floppy drive, you just
1. download and unpack plop
2. cd to the unpacked archive, locate plpbt.img, cd to its directory
3. insert a blank floppy in your drive then run
dd if=plpbt.img of=/dev/fd0
4. leave the floppy in the drive, insert the usb key and reboot
5. when the floppy boots you'll see in the menu an entry for usb
(you can use the shortcut u to boot directly on usb)
)
It's no use burning the iso if your original dvd didn't boot.
Unfortunately I found this out the hard way
I do not have grub/lilo installed and yes the PC does have a floppy drive so I have had a look at PLop but it seems like to boot it from a usb stick you have to re-format it to something called 'VFAT'?? I don't really want to reformat my usb stick because I use it in windows as well as linux.
I think netboot will be out of the question because the computer does no have an internet connection because there is not operating system on it, unless there is a way to point it to the dvd files to extract the files it needs to install?
But like I said previously, I can boot into an old Knoppix 3.7 live cd so would it be possible for me to copy the files from the dvd to a usb stick and then copy it to my hard drive from the live cd and then install? If possible - how?
Thanks
I think netboot will be out of the question because the computer does no have an internet connection because there is not operating system on it, unless there is a way to point it to the dvd files to extract the files it needs to install?
If you have a fast internet connection download a net install (if you want Debian) .iso image it will be less than 200mb. Don't try to download the DVD.iso. Burn the .iso to a disk AS A IMAGE at slow speed. Put it in the system and away you go.
A net install CD will set up the network connection for you, you don't need to have a operating system installed, that's what the net install CD is for.
I do not have grub/lilo installed and yes the PC does have a floppy drive so I have had a look at PLop but it seems like to boot it from a usb stick you have to re-format it to something called 'VFAT'?? I don't really want to reformat my usb stick because I use it in windows as well as linux.
VFAT (aka FAT32) is readable (quite well) by both Windows and Linux out of the box, go ahead and reformat it.
Last edited by Oldlaptop321; 08-03-2009 at 07:41 AM.
Reason: typo fix
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