Laptops :: Thinkpad 570 (No CD & No Floppy)

Mine actually had a floppy drive, just no CD...

From my observations on my install the DSL booting process does about the following:
1: Startup
2: search all useable devices (floppys harddisks, cdrom, usb thing) for the knoppix image thing
3: continue booting from the knoppix image thing

I've thougt up a posibble solution. It involves some tinkering with DOS and so on, and i'm not 100% sure if it works:

Make:
1: (FAT32) small start partition with DOS, this one set as bootable. Try about 2MB in size as you need the whole floppyimage on here
2: (FAT32) 50-60MB for DSL Linux source files (KNOPPIX and the minirt24.gz file)
3: (Linux swap) swap partition of some 30MB (slow but workable for the first few minutes)
4: (Linux normal) rest as ext2

Set MBR to standard DOS (fdisk /mbr)

Now format/s the first partition, so that the thing will boot.
Copy the KNOPPIX to the install drive, as instructions in the wiki go. there is no 'root' image file, use minirt24.gz instead, should go to the same folder as KNOPPIX image.

Get the embedded version of DSL and copy all the root stuff to the bootable partition
Get a reasonably recent version of 'Loadlin' (there is one on older debian cd's) and put that there too.

For the next steps guesswork as i don't know which is where... perhaps someone with more experience can help you out

- start loadlin using minirt24.gz
- Linux should boot, and when i guessed right, the dsl startup should search for the big knoppix image and find it.
- start the installation with 'dsl -install'

original here.