Bootfloppy and parallel cdrom drive

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Bootfloppy and parallel cdrom drive
started by: PipingFool

Posted by PipingFool on Sep. 23 2005,18:49

Hi,

A quick question. I recently obtained a Philips NB-470 series laptop (486DX4 100 with 16Mb ram and 500Mb HD) It has a floppy drive onboard but no CDrom. I do have an old 4-speed external (parallel) cdrom drive. Is it possible to use it to install DLS with use of a (dsl) boot floppy? I'd love to do a clean install of DSL and not copy it onto the harddrive.

Thanks in advance!!

Posted by cbagger01 on Sep. 23 2005,22:45

Anything is possible, but the easy way is:

Create a ~50MB MSDOS or "FAT" data partition, IE: "C" drive.
Boot up DOS / FreeDOS / Win95 and copy the \KNOPPIX file over from the CDROM and to C:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX Note the ALL UPPERCASE letters

Then create a DSL boot floppy disk.

Boot up DSL (aka "poorman's install).

Create a 450MB Linux data partition and format it EXT2 using

sudo su
cfdisk /dev/hda
mkfs -t ext2 /dev/hda2

Then do a DSL hard drive install or frugal install to this partition.
Then reboot the computer and boot up your new DSL system.

Then use cfdisk to delete your old FAT partition and recreate it as a Linux SWAP partition. Then type:

mkswap /dev/hda1

to format the swap partition.

Then reboot and your 450MB DSL + 50MB swap system is up and running.

Posted by pipngfool on Sep. 25 2005,12:06

Little question: does DSL have support for the Freecom parallel Power-CD built-in? (I know kernel 2.4.x should support it.) If it has I could boot from floppy and install like that from CD. I'm not able to get a dos floppy to work with the damned thing even though I'm not a dos newbie.

Posted by Update on Sep. 26 2005,19:00

Quote (Guest @ Sep. 25 2005,08:06)

Problem solved. I borrowed a 2.5" to 3.25 converter and copied the cd on the HD with my desktop pc. Now for the installation. Poorman's works, just takes some time to boot up. Next update in an hour or so?? Thanks for the help so far.