HOWTO HD install on a machine with only a floppy

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: HOWTO HD install on a machine with only a floppy
started by: AwPhuch

Posted by AwPhuch on April 14 2004,18:37

Hello everyone.
Im still blown away that I was actually able to do what I was planning on doing...
Ill explain...I have a very old laptop that a buddy of mine was gave to me, its a 75Mhz Pentium (classic) 16Megs RAM, 540MB harddrive, no CD ROM or USB available, 10/100 Kingston KNE-2 PCMCIA card, the only info online I could find about it was (FCC ID:FMA7600)...I truly thought I was fighting a futile battle but now im surfing the web on this little monster!

OK before I go into how I did it I want to let anyone know that before they get frustrated and throw it out of the window take a step back and catch your breath...many times I wanted to quit but kept on trying...

HERE GOES:

1. Get the ISO image from < DOWNLOAD PAGE >

2. Get your favorite ISO viewer program (< ISOBUSTER >, < DAEMON TOOLS >, or whatever)

3. Extract the ISO files to your harddrive:

Code Sample

index.html
autorun.inf
autorun.bat
KNOPPIX [DIR]

4. Get < WINRAR > and < UnRAR for DOS > files.

5. When you rar the files you will have to go into the adv tab and select the old archive names (otherwise you get filenames like unrar.part01.rar which will confuse DOS), dont worry about compression or whatnot it should handle that automatically. Once you rar the files you should have around 30-32 rar files that will fit on a floppy.

5. With a WIN98 < WIN98(no ramdrive) > boot floppy (dont worry about the error message about no cdrom) fdisk 2 (50meg) primary fat 32 paritions on the harddrive (dont worry about the extra space...Linux will handle that later).

Code Sample

Format them (C:\ and D:\) with format C: /u or D: /u

6. Using 2 "good" floppies copy over the individual rar files to the D: drive on the computer [/CODE]a:\copy *.* d:[/CODE], once you have all the files copied over we need to:
A: check the integrity of the files and
B: extract the files back to thier original state.

Code Sample

unrar t unrar.rar <---to test
unrar x unrar.rar c:\ <---to extract to c drive

7. Now that the rar files are useless we can fdisk and delete the d drive...

8. Create a DSL boot floppy by using < RAWWRITEWIN > and boot.img from the KNOPPIX dir.

9. Boot from DSL boot floppy and it will auto detect the c drive (/dev/hda1) and start running DSL.

You can either-
A: stop right here
B: create a swap parition if you want one
C: do a harddrive install

A: Will run directly from the /dev/hda1 compressed (a little slower but saves room)

B: Create a swap partion - Go into a terminal or shell and typing cfdisk (create a type 82 [linux swap] file however big you want it 64 Meg should be more than enuff)

Code Sample

sudo su (to become root)
cfdisk
tab to new
select primary
select starting cylinder, you can either select end cylinder or +64M and it will automatically calculate the cylinders needed for the swap space.
tab to type (hit a key to bypass) type 82 (for linux swap)
make sure you remember the name of the partition (more than likely /dev/hda2)
at the command line
tab to write and hit ok

ok now to activate the swap parition you just created
at command line type

Code Sample

mkswap /dev/hda2
once its done it will roll right back to a command line
then type swapon -a or reboot the system and then the DSL startup will automatically see the swap partition and mount it

C: Harddrive Install - If you dont have much ram like me (16megs) a swap partition is what is needed so do that 1st if you have enuff ram 32+Megs then you probably dont need a swap...

Code Sample

sudo su (to become root)
cfdisk
tab to new
create a primary (linux ex2) partition on the remainder of the HD
remember the parition name (more than likely /dev/hda3)
write and ok back to command prompt
cd /usr/sbin
then type ./dsl-hdinstall and follow the prompts

once its installed you can delete the fat32 partition that had the original files from DSL.

Once you do that you should now have a complete and running DSL system on your laptop and not have had to use a cd rom or find out about a network install...

Hope this helps

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by AwPhuch on April 29 2004,16:47

Anyone tried this yet?

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by squidy37 on May 07 2004,00:53

fdisk won't allow 2 primary partitions.. so i made the d drive an extended partition. hopefully this will work... inthe process xP

Posted by linnnn on May 12 2004,23:39

I used ISOBUSTER to extract the damnsmall-0.6.3.iso to my hd,and i got a KNOPPIX folder which contains index.html and another KNOPPIX folder with three files---boot.cat,boot.img and KNOPPIX(47,049KB).Is the KNOPPIX folder like the one on DSL CD?

Posted by AwPhuch on May 13 2004,21:20

Yes that is correct...just copy the two files over...the index.html and the entire KNOPPIX dir...

Knoppix boot floppy will autodetect the KNOPPIX file and start running it...

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by linnnn on May 14 2004,05:45

Thanks,AwPhuch.
If it's right,maybe my problem comes from bootusb.img.
my procedure is :
1.Use ISOBUSTER to extract the damnsmall-0.6.3.iso,and get index.html and KNOPPIX folder with three files---boot.cat,boot.img and KNOPPIX(47,049KB).
2.Move index.html and the KNOPPIX folder to my usb device.
3.Create a DSL boot floppy by using RAWWRITEWIN and bootusb.img.
4.Boot with the boot floppy.
Then i got:
Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem,sorry.
Dropping you to a (very limited) shell.
Press reset button to quit.
So,I think the problem is taht the bootusb.img can't detect my hardware.

Posted by AwPhuch on May 14 2004,18:29

ummm....no clue on the bootusb stuff

Quote

HOWTO HD install on a machine with only a floppy, HD install "floppy" only

Sorry I was actually using true floppys, not a USB pen...sorry
Hell that laptop doesnt even have usb

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by linnnn on May 17 2004,11:28

Thank you,AwPhuch,and sorry to ask the question here.But since I can't boot it from my usb device,I will try the method to boot it from a floppy or from a CD .

Posted by AwPhuch on May 17 2004,15:45

No problem, I wrote up this HOWTO for ppl with very old hardware.

The laptop I installed to by this method was a 75Mhz (90Mhz if on Turbo!!) with 16Megs ram and 504Mb HD, no CDROM, no USB. So I had to figure out a way to get the DSL image over to the hd so it would boot and then figure out how to get it to do a HD-install so it would run faster (uncompressing on the fly with only 16Megs RAM is horrible!)

I have tried this method 3 times with releases 6.2, 6.3 and 7.0 and the walkthru I have provide works every time...

Good luck

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by bjacobson on May 20 2004,19:21

Once I delete the first partition, what can I do to get my space back?

Posted by cbagger01 on May 21 2004,03:40

You can either use the leftover space as a swap partition, or you can resize your existing Linux partition using a tool like QTParted. Search for QTparted on "Google".

Posted by bjacobson on May 21 2004,04:14

Ok great thanks a ton.

One other thing I was wondering. I've got a lot of ogg files I want to put on (several hundred MB's worth). Can I rar those too, copy them to c:, then install from c onto the rest of the free space, and then copy the files from c to my ext2 partition in linux (from linux, of course)? It seems like that would work. But for the future, when I get more oggs (this is all assuming I can get my sound card to work), is there a linux program I can use to make a large zip on multiple floppies, similar to winrar for windows?

and one last thing: I ran toram on my barton 2500+ and it was fast. How much slower will it be on my 100 mhz pentium with 24 mB ram (to be upgraded to 72 soon I hope) laptop? I'm afraid I spoiled myself...

DSL is such a great distro. I'll be able to bring my old laptop into school now and everyone's gonna be like "whats that" and I'll be able to tell those windows punks that it is linux and that it is a pretty DSL. Its got lots of really useful apps that require the bare minimum to run. Its great. I know all this prolly should go in the feedback section, but for all those newbs who are trying to get this to work on their laptop/slow comp-hopefully another positive opinion from a relatively n00bie newb will help them through the pain. :angry:

Its hard I know.

Posted by AwPhuch on May 23 2004,04:28

Quote (bjacobson @ May 20 2004,15:21)

Once I delete the first partition, what can I do to get my space back?

What do you mean delete the 1st parition...
Oh once you have installed the DSL to harddrive

I used that 50 megs for a swap file, that way it isnt wasted

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by AwPhuch on May 23 2004,04:30

Quote (bjacobson @ May 21 2004,00:14)

Ok great thanks a ton.
and one last thing: I ran toram on my barton 2500+ and it was fast. How much slower will it be on my 100 mhz pentium with 24 mB ram (to be upgraded to 72 soon I hope) laptop? I'm afraid I spoiled myself...

Ummm...25 times slower!!!!!

Dont compare the 100 to the 2500...you will be veeery dissapointed if you try to!

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by Dud3! on May 31 2004,16:59

Edit: wrong spot, don't mind me, I got three hours of sleep.

Posted by Supcan on June 03 2004,02:46

Ok, first off I have an old laptop I'm trying to work with...
it's a Toshiba T1910CS 486,200 MG HD, 8 MG RAM.

I got all the files onto the C drive, and everything looks good.
I make the floppy drive and when I go to boot up, I get BOOT FAILED.

I've read in other places that the syslinux can't be read by older machines...I've been told to try LILO to boot. Any idea where I can find a LILO boot disk or am I way off?

Thanks,
Supcan

Posted by AwPhuch on June 04 2004,18:39

Double check your BIOS settings...
Im sure that machine should be able to run...

There are other threads that say 486 without coprocessor wont run the current kernel since it doesnt have mathcoprocessor support built in

Plus with 8Meg of RAM dont be suprised if you have to run your DSL in command line only as the graphics use alot more than 8Meg, thats alot of swappage!! My laptop with 16Meg is almost unbearably slow when I start opening files and whatnot...command line would be much much faster.

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by Ian "Bill" Morris on June 09 2004,13:26

I followed through the Hard Disk install but found that lilo would not be configured at the end. After some playing around I formatted the c:\ with the /s switch ie format c: /s which allowed lilo to be installed. Don't ask me why though.

Cheers

Bill

Posted by sci_fi on June 09 2004,17:48

Hello AwPhuch:

Thanks for your write up and encouragement. I am trying to get dsl up on my old omnibook 900. Not quite the problem you had, but still not there yet.

I copied the knopix directory (after using isobuster) to my c drive and the created a boot floppy using rawwritewin. When attempting to boot, the system hangs while identifying hardware.

Any advice you could give on how to start troubleshooting from there would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

sci_fi

Posted by AwPhuch on June 09 2004,19:23

Either you have a bad bootfloppy (driver modules corrupted) or it conflicts with some hardware...either disable everything you arent going to use in bios (com ports, ltp ports, extra ide controllers) or make a new bootfloppy. I had to burn 3 freeking bootfloppies before it would boot because they were bad even though it said it burned it sucessfully.

Hope this helps

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on June 10 2004,02:36

Brian -

I am trying to do this with an old Hitachi 133 laptop. I think I have everything figured out except the rar file creation. I am having trouble figuring out how to name the files as you say by checking something in the advanced tab. I cannot seem to find the option you are talking about. I am a beginner so be gentle. Thanks

BTW - I am using WinRAR

Chris

Posted by roberts on June 10 2004,05:13

Chris, Brian and others...

Just a question. Does these old laptops have pcmcia slots? Do you have access to a pcmcia network card? Would booting from tomsbrt "see" the network card and thus the network/internet?

Posted by AwPhuch on June 10 2004,18:50

Yes I do have a PCMCIA nic card, perhaps my (your) next HOWTO would be how to network boot using tomsbrt. I know nothing about that method, but know the floppy method works (takes a bit of work though)

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by AwPhuch on June 10 2004,19:01

Quote (clivesay @ June 09 2004,22:36)

When you are RARing the files there is a tab to hit that will allow you to set use old archive names. Just poke around and you will find it

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on June 10 2004,19:40

Thanks, Brian. I will give it another look this evening. I don't mind working a little if I can get the desired result!

Posted by sendas on June 10 2004,21:16

I have a laptop with just about the same stats as yours. I need it to run Open office or some other linux Xwindows Office suite. Is this possible with this slow of a machine?

Posted by clivesay on June 10 2004,22:33

Sorry to be a pain but where so you run the untar commands from? I tried running them from d: but I get bad command of filename. The command wants to look for the a: drive. Should I have something on a floppy? Thanks

Chris

Posted by cbagger01 on June 11 2004,01:53

Open Office will probably run verly slowly if at all on an older computer like this.

However, Siag Office should run fine on old machines.

If you are not satisfied with OOffice, Give Siag Office a try.

Posted by AwPhuch on June 11 2004,03:06

Quote (clivesay @ June 10 2004,18:33)

Im sorry....copy the dos command line winrar(unrar.exe program) to the dir where the .rar files are located...then input the commands from post 1 in there from the D: or C: drive

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on June 11 2004,10:43

Brian -

When I do an unrar t unrar.rar from the d: prompt I get the header "UNRAR 3.30 Freeware" and then "Cannot open unrar.rar" "No files to extract". Any ideas? Thanks

Chris

Posted by AwPhuch on June 11 2004,14:15

Are all your files in the d:\dir with the unrar.exe and.dll??

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on June 11 2004,14:43

Brian -

Sorry to be such a pain!!

All the files are in the d: directory. The unrar program had three files. I placed all of them in the d: dir. I can't remember if one was a .dll or not.

When I created the rar files I checked the option you mentioned in the advanced tab. All my files are named DSL.R01. DSL.R02, etc.....

Did I do something wrong? Thanks

Chris

Posted by AwPhuch on June 11 2004,18:14

Then change the command from unrar t unrar.rar to unrar t DSL.R01 (unless you have a DSL.rar file then use that)

Did that help

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on June 12 2004,03:45

Brian -

I can now say that I have DSL on this old laptop! Thank you. I would like to know how you got the resolution to work. I am just getting a screen with lines even after choosing 640x480. My laptop has 16mb like yours. Any help is appreciated. Thanks

Chris

Posted by tecker on June 12 2004,17:55

Quote

I got all the files onto the C drive, and everything looks good.
I make the floppy drive and when I go to boot up, I get BOOT FAILED.

and

Quote

I have the same problem but my situation is different. The laptop is a 486DX/486DX4 100mhz machine with 11 megs ram. It says that the numeric processor is present. I to get the boot failed problem. Is there anyway to boot using loadlin.exe or similar (don't quite remember the name) if i extracted the floppy to the harddrive?

Any help would be nice thanks

Posted by tecker on June 12 2004,18:18

OK I feal stupid but the floppy was not the boot disk (corrupt). So now i go to boot and it says it is out of memory and kernel panics. It only finds 9 megs of memory. is there a way to have it use a swap partition if i make one or am i Strait Outa Luck ;)

Posted by Ekylypse on June 13 2004,06:00

I am unsure, but I believe if you make a swap partition on the HDD you can, if it is modified, have it load into the Swap partition Just as it would to use a CD how it copies itself into the RAM it should be able to copy to a swap partition in a similar manner.

Just a guess.

Posted by AwPhuch on June 14 2004,14:32

Quote (clivesay @ June 11 2004,23:45)

Mine just worked...It came up and ran like a champ...unsure of why your screen resolution is hosed but with mine it worked fine....very slowly but worked fine

If you PM me I might be able to get you a copy of WIN95 on floppy as well...

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by redsoxfan on June 23 2004,16:43

I have tried this procedure on a IBM Thinkpad 701C. Everything works GREAT until I am running the dsl-hdinstall script. It seems to FREEZE the PC when copying the files from the CDROM contents on /dev/hda1 to the partition on /dev/hda2. The last line I see is "Now the root filesystem is filler with data...". When I ctrl-C to exit the script and reboot the PC, I get "missing operating system".

TIA,
Lee

Posted by AwPhuch on June 23 2004,16:53

Quote (redsoxfan @ June 23 2004,12:43)

What are the system specs of your machine?

The filling the root files take a loooong time on older hardware, did you follow the directions exactly??

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by clivesay on June 23 2004,19:16

I was thinking the same thing. You might want to try again and be veeeerrrrryyyyy patient!

Posted by redsoxfan on June 23 2004,21:38

The Thinkpad 701c is a 486 DX 75 - 40 MB RAM (the max) and a 340 MB HD. I'll try it again tonight and let it sit for a few hours!

Posted by cbagger01 on June 24 2004,01:44

I would let it run overnight.

This way you will not get tempted to pull the plug too early.

Posted by redsoxfan on June 24 2004,02:02

D'oh!!!!

I re-started the whole procedure from scratch. NOW the darn thing won't run cfdisk - it says there is a "fatal error" and "press any key to exit cfdisk"

What did I do? I re-fdisk'd the hard drive (from DOS) for the 1st partition, copied the files from a IDE attached CDROM, then rebooted with the DSL boot disk.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

Posted by Smurf on June 24 2004,04:34

I just wanted to say that i have run this on an old panasonic CF-35 laptop and have been able to get this running but my screen comes up all green. Any idea's on how to fix the res.?

I am running a 275mhz with 32mb of ram on a panasonic cf35 laptop.

Posted by redsoxfan on June 24 2004,14:53

OK - I was patient enough and now am booting off of the HD.

But... doing the xsetup.sh, I choose frame buffering, becasue VESA will never start and the laptop gets locked up (no response from numlock keypresses to the numlock light).

When I "startx" I get : modprobe: Can't locate module fb0
XIO fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X Server ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

Posted by AwPhuch on June 24 2004,14:59

Quote (redsoxfan @ June 23 2004,22:02)

Possible bad copy of the image to /dev/hda1
my suggestion would be to do a complete (secure wipe(I have a premade image at < dban wipdisk >) of your hd (mbr and all) since you have access to a cdrom drive.

Its always good to completely wipe (not format) a drive back to factory default b4 installing an os anyway

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by AwPhuch on June 24 2004,15:47

Quote (Guest @ June 24 2004,00:34)

That has to do with the display or possibly X11 settings...there is a thread just for that...

Sorry I cant help more...good luck

Brian
AwPhuch

Posted by redsoxfan on June 25 2004,00:42

Any ideas on my previous post? I have tried this with a Thinkpad 365X also and get the exact same results.

OK - I was patient enough and now am booting off of the HD.

But... doing the xsetup.sh, I choose frame buffering, becasue VESA will never start and the laptop gets locked up (no response from numlock keypresses to the numlock light).

When I "startx" I get : modprobe: Can't locate module fb0
XIO fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X Server ":0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining:(

Posted by cbagger01 on June 25 2004,17:26

Try adding "vga=789" to your boot command line in lilo.

Search the forums for LILO to get more details.

Posted by killer_tank_sa on Oct. 26 2004,02:04

ok i just dont get this. i cant get it to boot from a floppy disk with this procedure all i get is boot fail have tried 23 diffrent disks and 7 of those i made right from the dsl running on a diffrent machine. any idea's would be apperciated.

Posted by Gariun on Nov. 27 2004,03:21

Okay, I have been reading these forums for a couple days now, trying to figure out the best way to do this. First off, this is a wonderful install!!! When it works that is.

I had a copy of dsl 6 running off HD on a Compaq 5300 lte perfectly, except the pcmcia wouldnt work. always booted up with an error for the cardmgr. So, i decided to switch to the newest version. After copying and recopying disks for hours( copying over the rar files) got everything unrared to the c:/ drive, and got booted, ran perfectly. Went to run cfdisk to install to the hd, and i get a fatal error saying it cannot access the HD. Well, i checked it out(because right now I dont have the cdrom in, because it has the swappable cdrom and floppy, only one at a time) and when i looked at the mount points, it mounted /dev/hda1 as the cdrom. now, this kinda makes sense since that is where the knoppix cd image is, BUT, for some reason i cant install to the HD now... Any ideas?? Thanks a lot

Posted by Gariun on Nov. 27 2004,03:39

Nevermind!! I am an idiot!!! Forgot to sudo SU for root, great feature by the way, makes me feel a little better that you can only modify the HD if your root... But, its been a long day. I actually did not have to be root under the dsl 6 install, which is what screwed me up I think. But anyway, running awesome now!! Thanks!!

Posted by xvr on Jan. 02 2005,18:13

I Installed My DSL Linux to an old Presario LTE 5000 Notebook
(800MB HDD, 16 MB RAM, ) But Using Floppys to do this sounds crazy.

1 Using an Old Serial or Parallel Cable and Soldering Iron, make a LapLink Cable, http://oldfiles.streamlinetrial.co.uk/powerload/cable.htm

(A serial is the easiest, but slower)

Boot the computer into DOS regieme, then Load program LAPLINK 4 < http://oldfiles.streamlinetrial.co.uk/powerload/download/laplink4.exe > to Target PC and transfer the files to Drive C: at 115,000 Baud, still takes about 45 Minute, But it works and after the long Initial Decompress of First Boot, It can Be installed Permanent .