bios doesn't support cd boot

Forum: Laptops
Topic: bios doesn't support cd boot
started by: pminmo

Posted by pminmo on Nov. 10 2006,15:40

I have an old compaq lte5300, that I want to use DSL on. The bios doesn't support CD booting, just HD and floppy. The floppy has to be swapped out to install the cd drive and I doubt it's hot swappable. Is there an extension for one of the boot managers, grub, lilo... that has extensions to boot from a cd that I could install? The laptop currently has win98 on it.

Posted by Ramik on Nov. 10 2006,20:06

Semi-Official solution from the WIKI:
< http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/index.php/Boot_Floppies >

My 2nd solution:
I prefer using a dos boot-disk with CD-ROM support and loadlin.

Pro: Easy and common.
Con: Limited Functionality.

My 3rd solution:
I prefer using a linux boot-disk with FTP server and fdisk+ext2 support.

Pro: Strong & Versatile.
Con: Hard and uncommon.

Posted by pminmo on Nov. 16 2006,22:47

I wound up installing SBM on the HD, it has an option to boot from CD. It Works!

Posted by evildarknight on Dec. 07 2006,13:23

yep smart boot manager works you should als see some post out there about booting without cdrom should help