boot from floppy to cd help

[thedougler]

hey, i recently scored an old pentium lappy and I wanna throw on a linux distro. Unfortunately it is limited to booting from its floppy drive or HDD. I have an external CD-Rom drive attatched via parallel port but it isnt recognized until windows boots.

The question is, is there a boot floppy I can get somewhere that will just install some drivers and then try to boot from my CD-ROM drive.

Any help would be appreciated

[Stefann]

hey, i recently scored an old pentium lappy and I wanna throw on a linux distro. Unfortunately it is limited to booting from its floppy drive or HDD. I have an external CD-Rom drive attatched via parallel port but it isnt recognized until windows boots.

The question is, is there a boot floppy I can get somewhere that will just install some drivers and then try to boot from my CD-ROM drive.

Any help would be appreciated

You would need a GRUB/LILO boot floppy that can recognize it, and also we'd need to know what distro you plan on loading, anyways I can't help you as I am not a hardware and GRUB guru, sorry.

[thedougler]

i guess i hadnt really gotten that far, it is a pentium 1 with 40 megs of ram and I dont know what distro to put un, somethng lowimpact though so it can run at an acceptable speed but still has office apps

[Stefann]

i guess i hadnt really gotten that far, it is a pentium 1 with 40 megs of ram and I dont know what distro to put un, somethng lowimpact though so it can run at an acceptable speed but still has office apps

you could barely get text mode running with that RAM and CPU speed(well RAM at least), you have no hopes on getting X to run, the only 'office' app for it would be a text editor. Sorry dude, but that thing might as well be thrown in the garbage.

[farslayer]

Wel for Distro I would suggest you look at DSL Linux for thos specs...

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/

There are varous ways to install linux (directly from teh hard drive, via ftp, etc.. etc. ) read through the install docs for wahtever distro you pick to find out what options are available.


Minimum Requirements for DSL with X-windows

* 486dx or 100% compatible processor
* 16mb ram (24mb recommended)
* dual-speed CDROM (quad-speed or better recommended)
* 1.44mb floppy drive (for boot floppy, if needed)
* VGA monitor and video card
* a mouse (serial, ps/2, usb)

So the only sticky wicket here is your CDROM drive... but once you get it installed you shouldn't need to worry about the CDROM drive.

Finally, if your CDROM drive is still not found by DSL upon bootup and you are using DOS/Win9x/WinME, it is still possible to use DSL.

First, boot up with your old operating system.

Second, insert the DSL livecd disk.

Third, copy the \KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX file over to C:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX

NOTE THAT YOU SHOULD USE ALL CAPITAL LETTERS FOR THE DIR NAME AND FILE NAME

Fourth, reboot your computer using the DSL boot floppy.

It should find the "KNOPPIX" file on your hard drive and boot into DSL. This is known as a "Poorman's Install" of DSL to your hard drive with boot floppy.

[googled first]

DSL isn't your only choice but it's a good one. The trick is to run a window manager instead of a desktop enviroment. DSL uses fluxbox (window manager) as default.
The last machine I installed it on had 32MB RAM. I couldn't boot from CD so downloaded the bootimage from DSL's site.
DSL is only 50MB but is basically Knoppix (debian) so you can 'grow' it.
As mentioned in the post above, that external cd drive may cause a problem, but nothings lost in trying.
Good luck

[thedougler]

thx everyone, just dl-ing DSL now, will edit post when all is said and done

btw stefann i might havce been a little hasty to want office apps, but saying it would be hard to get a gui seems kind of stupid... seeing as it is running windows 95 right now

think about it

EDIT:

Unfortunately the laptop I thought was mine, in fact was my fathers, and he dosent want linux. so its over, i will find out if i can delete this. If not, i guess it will just rot in "In Progress" hell