HD install on a very old laptop without NIC and CD

Forum: HD Install
Topic: HD install on a very old laptop without NIC and CD
started by: NewLinuxGuy

Posted by NewLinuxGuy on Dec. 04 2006,23:13

I followed this post < http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....inuxguy > to install the DSL onto an old Toshiba Satellite 110 CT (Pentium 100 MHz, 16 MB), along the way learned a few tricks. This forum has been a great help and I hope what I learned would help others to save some time and trouble.

1. Getting the DSL image onto the PC.

At the time of installation, I did not have a NIC nor CDROM. So first challenge was to get the 50MB image (current.iso) onto the PC.

The laptop has a Win95 on it. I used dialup connection and a manual ftp command to download the file. It took 11 hours to do so. But besides tied up the phone line, it run by itself over night, did not bother me.

Later I bought an OPTEC 4-in-1 PCMCIA card adaptor, and used a SD card to transfer files from other PC to this laptop. Works great. And “Tom's Root Boot” can access the card and made the installation much easier

2. Creating the DSL bootfloppy diskette.

My hardware is too old to support 1.77MB floppy required to create the boot diskette. I used the Partition Magic to create a 2MB partition on my hard drive and created the boot image on it follow the same instruction. And setup the partition as default boot partition. It worked at first try.

3. Boot up options.

The default boot up options do not support low memory machines. You need to add “mem=16M”. I also add nousb, nodma, noapm, noscsi to save the time and resources;

4. HD installation.

The default HD installation scripts need /tmp on RAMDISK to dump the temporary files. Since I used the mem=16M option and the system did not create the RAMDISK to save the memory space. The script failed to run. Once I manually created /tmp, it worked.

5. PCMCIA card (5 volts and 16 bit) via Card Bus (3.5 volts and 32 bits). – not quite the installation, but gave me a lot of headache.

At first I did not understand the difference between PC card and cardbus. So end up brought and returned a few wireless cards. If your laptop is very good, chances are it will only support 16 bits PC card.

With only 16 MB of memory, Firefox is too slow to be practical. I set up the laptop in the kitchen. Used the cron job to get weather in the morning, run a slide show on the day, pull the stock info at dinner time, and run another weather info around 10:00 pm. If my wife let me setup a smaller printer in the kitchen, I might set it up as a 2nd printer server as well.