can i use a boot disk on external CD_ROM

Forum: Laptops
Topic: can i use a boot disk on external CD_ROM
started by: cxr_azy

Posted by cxr_azy on April 03 2005,20:22

the cd-rom drive in my laptop is a peice... and i have an external cd-rom drive i never use, and it reads alot faster. Is there any way i can configure the laptop to boot off of this... i couldnt find anything in BIOS, and wondered if there was another way to do it.
Help would be appreciated.

haha, 2 topics in 2 days... anyone for 3?

Posted by cbagger01 on April 04 2005,03:57

Using external CDROMs for booting are a major PITA.

There are floppy bootloaders that will attempt to try and boot from cdrom but they usually expect a "normal" internal IDE / ATAPI CDROM drive to be the boot device and not some special external drive like a backpack CDROM.

If it is a USB external CDROM and it is a Mass Storage Compliant device (no drivers required for Window XP or Mac) then you can use it with the Damn Small Linux USB boot floppy. You can download this floppy image from the web site.

Otherwise, your best bet is to boot up in Win95/98/ME and copy the \knoppix\knoppix file over to C:\knoppix\knoppix and then create a DSL boot floppy (image can also be downloaded from the DSL web site) with the rawrite32 program. Then use the boot floppy and it will see your C:\ drive as if it were a CDROM drive and boot up fine.

Posted by Waterns on April 04 2005,14:48

I believe you can boot up DSL and then click boot options and tell it to copy the CD image to HD. After that I believe it would be a simple step to simply mount the external CD drive and have read from there. But then agian that would mean that your CD drive works fairly decent.