Booting Linux Installer

No Name · Post by **No Name** » Fri May 13, 2005 1:50 pm

I was trying to install Linux on an older computer yesterday. The problem is that it will not boot off CD or USB drive, and I can't find a way to boot it otherwise. It came with a boot disk image, but it is 6 megs, so its pretty much useless.

butters · Post by **butters** » Fri May 13, 2005 11:43 pm

Install grub to a floppy and use the grub prompt to boot the CD.

semicolo · Post by **semicolo** » Sat May 14, 2005 7:36 am

look on the cd, there must be floppy images.
Depending on the distribution you may need to make 2 or more floppies (using rawrite) then use them to boot the kernel, install needed modules, mount a ramdisk and the installation will start, choose cd as source.

Also read the docs

No Name · Post by **No Name** » Sat May 14, 2005 9:51 pm

Like I said, there is what seems to be a floppy image, but it is 6 megs.

Butters - How do I do that? Also, I have no floppy drive on my only machine that currently runs Linux.

butters · Post by **butters** » Sat May 14, 2005 9:56 pm

How about you take the hard drive out and put in another machine and install to there?

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sat May 14, 2005 11:42 pm

Is there anything already on the older computer? It might be possible to use whatever's already on there to start the Linux installation, or at least create a boot disk.

It might also help to know what distro you're trying to install. Most of them have alternate installation methods.

Other possibly useful information - does it have a network card, and how big is the hard drive? It might be possible to to a network install, or partition the drive in two and install from ISO images on the hard drive.

No Name · Post by **No Name** » Sun May 15, 2005 12:00 am

Right now all thats on the drive is a partition ~2.5 megs that is required by the BIOS. I believe there are two 1-2 gig drives in it and it does have a network card.

BlackAura · Post by **BlackAura** » Sun May 15, 2005 1:19 am

I just thought of the most obvious solution...

Do you have a Windows machine with a floppy drive? If so, you can use that to make a boot floppy. If not, grab the floppy drive out of the old PC, temporarily install it in your Linux box, and use that to make a boot floppy.

Now, we need some way to boot the CD. The only reasonable way I found was Smart Boot Manager. It's bootloader, like LILO or GRUB, that sits in the MBR of a hard drive, or from a floppy disk. In addition to allowing you to boot different operating systems, it allows you to boot from external devices, like floppies, or CDs (using it's own El-Torito implementation, so it'll work if the system BIOS doesn't have one).

SBM comes as an install program for DOS and Linux. You can use it to build a bootable floppy disk. If you want to install SBM on your old PC's hard drive, you can do that too by sticking the DOS version on an bootable floppy and running it from there.

Slackware has a pre-built SBM floppy image:

http://slackware.at/data/slackware-curr ... ootmgr.dsk

Download that, and write it to a floppy disk. From Linux, do:

Code: Select all

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

From Windows, use a disk imaging program.

http://www.fdos.org/ripcord/rawrite/

Write that to a floppy, stick it in your older PC, and select "Boot from CD" from the menu.

If you want to keep SBM on your hard drive for later use, grab the Linux binaries and use them to install to the MBR after you've installed Linux.

No Name · Post by **No Name** » Sun May 15, 2005 5:14 pm

I do have access to a Windows machine with a floppy drive. I'll try that when I get a chance.