DSL on old, old PC

[martinfromdublin]

Hi all,

How can I run DSL on a very old PC that has no 'boot from CD' option in it's BIOS?

Thanks,

Martin

[bigtomrodney]

Hey Martin. You need to get your hands on smartbootmanager. You can boot the floppy and this in turn will allow you to boot from almost anything. Rescued my old P1

Smart Boot Manager

The only hard part is writing the disk image to the floppy. And that's not hard at all

[martinfromdublin]

Hi Bigtomrodney,

Good to talk to you again! Been out of action for a while sincce I broke my leg last October...

Can you walk me though this? Which file do I downlaod and where do I go next? The old PC I want to try DSL on is a piece of junk running Windows 95, has an old Cyrix 100 mhz processor with 80 RAM. As it's an old machine, I'm not too worried if I mess up it's OS, I'll just re-install Win 95 if I have to but maybe, I'll install DSL just to see if I can do it.....

Let the fun begin!

Martin

[truoc444]

i cheat and use a different machine that i can boot from the cd. i swap out the hard drive, install to the hard drive, then move the hard drive back to the original machine. it typically finds all the devices and reconfigures itself and is good to go in a matter of minutes.

[brokndodge]

I don't know anything about DSL but debian has floppy images on their download page www.debian.org, then i always do a net install. if u don't have broadband...... i dunno?

[bigtomrodney]

Okay so with the Smart Boot Manager option - Check out this site http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm . I had forgotten that the official site doesn't do floppy images, just binaries.
Download the image here
You can then dd the image to a floppy on one of your other linux boxes. There is also a comparison command there , it's up to yourself if you want to run that.

dd if=/path/to/image/file of=/dev/fd0

Once that's done you can boot it on the cyrix machine. It looks a bit like Grub, with a few more options. It's cool because you can even boot individual partitions on it. Hmmm. Gives me an idea about a multipartition-multiboot dvd.......

[martinfromdublin]

Hi again Bigtomrodney,

I'm not quite with you, sorry.Do I just download the image as it is to a floopy? 'Cause I tried that and it won't boot, so I seem to have got that one wrong. When you say dd, can you fill me in on what exactly that means? Sorry for all the questions but after being out of action for so long with the broken leg, I've lost touch with a lot of what I learned in Linux but now I'm eager to get back up to speed!

Thanls,

Martin

[squirrelplayingtag]

Nah dude. You have to dowload the image to somewhere on your hard drive, say "/home/you" Then you would put a floppy in your drive and from a terminal run
"dd if=/home/you/file of=/dev/fd0". That should write it to the floppy.

If you are running windows there are other commands you use but I'm not on windows right now and don't remember what they were. But if you are using linux that should work for you.

[martinfromdublin]

Hi Squirrelplayingtag,

It's in my home diectory, that would be /home/martin, so I modified your command and this is what I got,

martin@box:~$ su
Password:
root@box:/home/martin# dd if=/home/martin/file of=/dev/fd0
dd: opening `/home/martin/file': No such file or directory
root@box:/home/martin#

So I've overlooked something in the command. There are other files in that folder so I assume we need to tell the system exactly which file to copy? Can you help me with the right command, I'm pretty crap with the command line, as I say, 7 months with a broken leg has lef me out of the Linux 'loop' and I've forgotten a lot of what I learned but I really want to get back into it..

Thanks,

MArtin

[brokndodge]

dd if=/home/martin/sbootmgr.dsk of=/dev/fd0