Distro with diskettes for floppy boot setup that supports USB

[Dookus]

Situation- Laptop (2003 made Toshiba 2410) with dead secondary controller, so no CD\DVD drive, BIOS does not support any form of booting from USB.
Laptop has working floppy (had to repair it)
Please advise of distros that are good for older units like that that also support booting from diskettes, and then can mount and install from a USB CD\DVD rom drive.

Thanks all .

[oz]

Situation- Laptop (2003 made Toshiba 2410) with dead secondary controller, so no CD\DVD drive, BIOS does not support any form of booting from USB.
Laptop has working floppy (had to repair it)
Please advise of distros that are good for older units like that that also support booting from diskettes, and then can mount and install from a USB CD\DVD rom drive.

Hello and welcome!

You can take a look at UNetbootin to see if it might meet your needs. Note that a CD/DVD or floppy drive is not needed, and you get a nice selection of distros to choose from. Hope it works out!

[Rubberman]

Hello and welcome!

You can take a look at UNetbootin to see if it might meet your needs. Note that a CD/DVD or floppy drive is not needed, and you get a nice selection of distros to choose from. Hope it works out!

Ozar, he said that the laptop cannot boot from USB... That kind of rules out UNetBootin I think. I have installed Linux in the past from floppy, but not for a looooong time (8 or 9 years at least). I'll have to look to see if there are decent current distros that can cold boot from a floppy, and finish from the network.

Anyway, here are what I see as the options:

1. See if Toshiba has a BIOS update that can fix the USB booting problem
2. See if the system can boot from the network
3. Find a distribution that can be installed from floppy

... Somewhat later ...

I did some research on the Unetbootin page at SourceForge and discovered that they linked to a program call SBM - Smart Boot Manager. This is a program that can be installed on a floppy, and then can be used to boot stuff from USB, like a UNetbootin created Live USB distribution of Linux, even if the BIOS doesn't support that! Here is a link to their page, and I am attaching their user guide (a tarball of html files) for your perusal: Smart BootManager

BTW, SBM doesn't say it can boot from a USB drive, but it would be worth trying anyway. At worst you'll need a single floppy disc...

[Rubberman]

I just looked on the Toshiba web site. There are a lot of sub-models for this laptop such as S185, S203, S204, S205, and S206. The questions are:

1. Which one do you have.
2. What is the version of your BIOS (can be found by booting into the BIOS). It may be that a newer BIOS can fix the USB booting problem. Here is the page on their web site to download this stuff: Toshiba Support - Homepage
and here is the download page for the S203 model: Model Content Page

[Dookus]

[QUOTE=Rubberman;833786]I just looked on the Toshiba web site. There are a lot of sub-models for this laptop such as S185, S203, S204, S205, and S206. The questions are:

1. Which one do you have.
2. What is the version of your BIOS (can be found by booting into the BIOS). It may be that a newer BIOS can fix the USB booting problem. Here is the page on their web site to download this stuff
and here is the download page for the S203 model:


I have installed Puppy with a bootdisk made for installing Puppy in my scenario exactly.
Have had this laptop a long time, there has been no BIOS update available ever that fixed the no boot from USB problem. It's a Satellite 2410 Model PS241A-5G8WEP, a search for just the model number brings up posts buy me and one other old page with the price and details from 2003.

Thanks for the help, good to have it back, quick and usable .. now the learning curve.

[oz]

Ozar, he said that the laptop cannot boot from USB... That kind of rules out UNetBootin I think.

No, Unetbootin can do frugal installs to the hard drive, so booting from a USB drive isn't necessarily required, either, hence the suggestion to take a look at it to see if it might work for him.

Good luck with it, whatever route you take, Dookus!

[Dookus]

No, Unetbootin can do frugal installs to the hard drive, so booting from a USB drive isn't necessarily required, either, hence the suggestion to take a look at it to see if it might work for him.

Good luck with it, whatever route you take, Dookus!

Thanks all .. my reply before seems to have been changed to my original post .. how strange .. anyway .. it's up and running with Puppy Linux, there is a download that makes a bootable diskette that scans for USB devices and live boots from any that contain Puppy, I was then able to install Puppy to the HDD, it's working well, very quick on this old unit.
There are no BIOS updates, it's a Satellite 2410 Model PS241A-5G8WEP, from what I can find it was released in Australia only, apart from posts I have made the only results Google brings are an Australian page with details of the unit and price, the page is dated 2003.

Cheers guys, back to enjoying my old laptops new lease on life

[oz]

it's up and running with Puppy Linux

Glad you are up and running. Yes, Puppy is indeed a very nice little distro. Hope it continues to serve you well!