Booting CD from Floppy

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Booting CD from Floppy
started by: remycs

Posted by remycs on Sep. 25 2004,03:14

I'm trying to run the CD on an old PB 486 DX2 that can't boot from CD. The CD-ROM is a Reveal SC400 I added later.

I have created the CD from the ISO file, as well as the Boot floppy (The CD can boot on my newer desktop). When I boot from the floppy, it gets to the point where it scans for devices with knoppix, can't find it, then goes to the minimal shell.

I have tried the trick of copying the CD onto my Win95-provisioned HD, but it still can't find either the CD or Hard Drive copy.

When I've made boot floppies in the past, I've had to include the config files for the CD-ROM. Do I have to do something similar here? I'm just trying to run from CD at this point; I'll try a HD install later.

Thanks.

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 25 2004,03:27

The Win95 trick should work.

If you have a normal IDE hard drive and you C:\ drive is the first partition it should find it no problem.

You should have a C:\KNOPPIX directory with a big file inside it.

If your hard drive is a SCSI drive or it is partitioned in a weird way it could cause problems.

If it is a SCSI drive you may be able to get it to boot with the USB boot floppy image because the USB drive and the SCSI drives both appear under the sda name that is searched by the boot script.

Another option is to pull the hard drive and temporarily install it into a newer computer. Then do a DSL installation on it and then reinstall it back into the original computer.

I doubt that using your DOS CDROM driver will help because most special CDROM drivers are not in the search path for the KNOPPIX filesystem. For example, I have an old computer with a Mitsumi CDROM drive and special controller. It works in linux, but it is registered under the name "mcd" instead of "hdc" or "scd" like a normal CDROM drive. So even if I boot in expert mode and manually load in the CDROM driver the Knoppix boot script still refuses to find the KNOPPIX filesystem.

This is why I went with the Win95 trick also known as the poorman's install.

Good Luck.

Posted by remycs on Sep. 25 2004,04:41

Thanks for the help. I tried the USB boot disk, but got the kernel panic message referenced in another post (see < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....=2630). >
I then tried to load 0.7.3 by making a new CD/floppy and reloading the files, but that's not working either.

I think the drive is IDE, or at least those are the drivers it's using.

I'm not quite ready to pull the drive yet. Any other suggestions?

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 25 2004,06:08

Unfortunately, I'm out of ideas besides trying the "failsafe" boot command option.

My guess is that you have an ISA based hard drive controller and it is not autodetected properly by the knoppix autodetection routines that are used by DSL.

You may be able to detect it by trying some of the boot parameters mentioned here, but it is grasping at straws:

< http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/BootPrompt-HOWTO-7.html >

You might be able to get a version of Linux that is designed for really old computers to work with this PC. For example, a really old version of Slackware or better yet a more recent distro like "Basic Linux" or "Deli Linux".

Once you get them up and running you may be able to steal the boot parameters that are used there and apply them to the DSL boot prompt.

Good Luck.

Posted by remycs on Sep. 25 2004,06:35

Thanks. I'll keep working on it.

Posted by remycs on Oct. 02 2004,06:07

I finally got DSL running!

It turned out that Win95 had Drivespace on. I was copying onto the compressed hard drive. Once I moved the files to the uncompressed section, it booted OK.