Floppy Disk Installation

Forum: HD Install
Topic: Floppy Disk Installation
started by: ikonos

Posted by ikonos on Dec. 04 2005,11:50

Hi,
I have a really old laptop.
in the moment windows 95 is running on it, but it's very slow and the hdd is very full.

the laptop has a 486DX CPU and 32Mb Ram.
The HDD has got a size of 200mb.
The laptop has only a floppydisk.

I think Damn Small Linux could be the right thing, for this machine.

Now I want to know, if there is a possibility to install DSL via Floppy Disks.

Thank you for your answers

Ikonos

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Dec. 04 2005,20:14

< Here is a list of a few ways. >

Installing with floppies is very tedious. You would do better to drop the hdd into another computer and install on the other computer. You will probably need a 44-to-40 pin IDE adapter, which will cost you much less than the floppies you will need for a floppy-only install.

-J.P.

Posted by pvdvyve on Dec. 04 2005,21:43

Do you have an ethernet card in that old machine? Ones you have some experience in the network world, installing is an easy thing over the net.
Otherwise indeed a possible solution is taking out the hard disk and putting it into another machine to make a "poor man's install or another setup. I would prefer a "poor man's install", becouse you only need a 50 Mb and you have another 150 M to put some data on that machine of yours. In the other case you wil have not enough place with 200 Mb (if I remember right you need at least 250 or 300 Mb for a real install.)

What is a "poor man's install?"
Find more about it here:
< http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17345 >

Posted by sarah on Dec. 05 2005,16:23

As long as you have an ethernet card, try
< http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki....tall%29 >

I would partition hda1 65M, hda2 65M and the remainder for swap.

Don't waste your time with the floppies, there's WAY too much that can go wrong :o(

Posted by sarah on Dec. 05 2005,16:29

Also, I use a PCMCIA card for ethernet access on my laptop - which is P75 / 16MB RAM with around 220-250MB usable HD space.

DSL does pretty well with the Linux friendly network cards, and they're not very expensive to buy if you don't have one.

I think it's funny how we assumed you have no use for Win95 on your laptop. ;o)

Posted by ikonos on Dec. 24 2005,22:39

hi
i'll go to buy a pcmcia ethernetcard for network installing.
in the tutorial, that was given (http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Floppy_Only_Install_with_Netcard_%28Poormans_Install%29) is used a special distribution.
maybe the distribution hasn't got the drivers for that card.
now i wnat to ask, if there are other possibilities for netinstall, maybe per tftp, so i could use etherbootimages with the right drivers...

are there any possibilities and howto's??

ikonos