Need boot floppy for 486 that won't boot from CD

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Need boot floppy for 486 that won't boot from CD
started by: deh

Posted by deh on Dec. 23 2004,01:35

How do I make a boot floppy to boot a 486 that does not boot from the CD-ROM?

I tried Smart Boot Manager. It works fine on a P-III, but fails on the 486 (as well as a P-4, which of course doesn't need to boot from a floppy). Apparently SMB has a problem with some bios'.

I tried the dos 'rawrite' to copy a 'linux24' from the dsl cd. The 486 seemed to readin the file, then began dumping the registers, over and over.

Don

Posted by cbagger01 on Dec. 23 2004,01:44

Your 486 computer probably has a special CDROM disk drive.

Back in the old days, most CDROM drives were not controlled by the computer's IDE or SCSI disk controller. Instead, they were controlled by a custom interface that was usually built into the vendor's sound card.

Soundblaster & Aztec (mitsumi) both did this.

It is possible to use these drives when running Linux if you manually load the proper driver file AFTER your system is booted up in Linux.

Of course, this is a Catch-22 situation because you NEED the CDROM drive in order to boot up in the first place.

You can use the "expert" mode to manually load the drivers from a floppy disk at boot time but the boot process will still fail because the bootscripts don't bother looking at your weird CDROM device name (/dev/mscdx0 for example).

So the best thing is to do the following:

Boot into MSWindows or MSDOS.

Copy the \KNOPPIX directory over to your C: drive so it appears as C:\KNOPPIX\ You will need 50MB of free disk space.

From the DSL web site, download the floppy boot image file:

< ftp://ibiblio.org/pub....8.0.img >

Then download this windows program and use it along with the above mentioned image file to create a DSL boot floppy disk:

< http://www.duskware.com/download/rawrite.zip >

Then boot your 486 with the DSL boot floppy inserted into the floppy disk drive.

Have fun.

Posted by deh on Dec. 23 2004,03:01

Thanks. That worked.

Smart Boot Manager is great when works. Too bad it won't handle more bios's.

Don

Posted by Larry Smith on Dec. 31 2004,22:05

If you're still interested, I have a floppy for the old BIOSes to boot the CDROM.

revlarrysmith@adelphia.net