Boot CD from ms-dos (like distro's with dosutils)


Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Boot CD from ms-dos (like distro's with dosutils)
started by: martinalexander

Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 05 2006,17:10
Ok, this is the situation:

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 420CDT Laptop, BUT... Only with CD-Rom (no floppy)!

So... I moved the harddrive to another laptop with floppy to install ms-dos on a 50mb "rescue partition" and also drivers for the CD-Rom (the damn thing does'nt even auto-boots, so you need drivers to get it spinning from ms-dos :p )!!!

I wonder if there's any way to boot DSL from ms-dos? I tried another linux-distro called Best-Linux 2000 (whoa, that's slooow ??? ), and it has a "dosutils" folder on the cd containing one file called "autorun.bat"!!!

With that file you could actually boot the cd from within dos  :O !!!

Is there any way to boot the DSL-cd from within ms-dos, or perhaps another very low-resource GUI-linux that can do this???

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Nov. 05 2006,21:16
It probably used loadlin.

There's some other install methods that you could try if you can change your bootloader.

Posted by humpty on Nov. 06 2006,06:09
assuming d: is your cdrom, and you have loadlin.exe in your path,

rem BOOT.BAT
d:
cd \boot\isolinux
loadlin linux24 initrd=minirt24.gz dsl dma restore=hda1 mydsl=hda1 vga=791

and maybe fromhd=/dev/scd1 if it doesn't find the /KNOPPIX directory on you cdrom.

more tips here;
< http://petepr.hopto.org/dsl/guides.html >

Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 18 2006,10:59
Coming back to a pretty old question (i just did'nt want to mess with this then)!

I got some error message about it could not find knoppix filesystem  ??? !

EDIT: Yes, I saw the extra "fromhd"-line but:
1) should I just add this to the previous line
2) what should I write instead of "/dev/scd1" if I boot from an usb-drive (d:)???

Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 18 2006,19:30
I used < this > guide in the wiki-pages to start the install using loadlin, and just executed the command "loadlin @options.txt", but I just get an error-message:

Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press reset button to quit.

PLZ help  :( !

Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 18 2006,22:56
Well, helloooo, I'm still waiting to get DSL working on my laptop, but nobody wants to help me apparently :( !
Posted by roberts on Nov. 19 2006,01:40
In DOS I find linld much easier to work with.
< http://port.imtp.ilyichevsk.odessa.ua/linux/linld/ >

If you say you can boot to dos and "see" your cdrom then linld should be very easy.

For example on my system dos "sees" my cdrom drive as drive e:
Then by only having a small com file linld.com I can type at the dos prompt

linld image=e:\boot\isolinux\linux24 initrd=e:\boot\isolinux\minirt24.gz "cl=ramdisk_size=100000 lang=us"

Note the above line is one long line!

Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 19 2006,07:29
Well, I'll try, btw I'm still using usb only, have no cdrom :p !
Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 19 2006,07:39
Well, GR8, same error message :rock: !
Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 19 2006,15:22
I still need help, can you believe it guys :p !!!!!
Posted by roberts on Nov. 19 2006,16:53
If from dos, you can access your cdrom, then why not copy over the main DSL files into a small parition on hard drive, then use linld or loadlin to boot.
Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 19 2006,17:09
Well, I could do this, but I want to whipe the partitions and only run dsl!
Posted by roberts on Nov. 19 2006,17:59
And when you are done, the 50MB dos install parition could be used for your swap parition. In fact, start by making a 128MB dos install partition. Nothing wasted. I describe this procedure in the Wiki in the net install method.
Posted by martinalexander on Nov. 19 2006,19:18
I tried to boot from hdd instead... totally different error, something with some adress, and a "table" full of numbers :0  !!!
Posted by roberts on Nov. 19 2006,19:27
Should have posted your specs in the first post.
A 100Mhz 8MB memory laptop is not enough.

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