Booting Knoppix from floppy

[steve at horne.homelinux.net]

Me Too! Me Too|

I have a Sony Viao  n505ve  that I'd love
to get knoppix onto -- it has a usb floppy,
external (pcmcia) cd (not the sony brand)...
was never able to get Knoppix to boot -- 

I put redhat 6.2 on an identical machine via network,
years ago -- that worked well -- but the later "big" 
distributions feel way too massive, ponderous and
slow  for a 300 mhz 64 meg machine.
(Any distribution recommendations?  I have Vectorlinux running on a similar
machine -- but the usb floppy stymied me here too...)

                                 Steve

                               
On Tue, Jan 04, 2005 at 09:06:11AM -0500, Bill Horne wrote:
> Thanks for reading this: I need help booting Knoppix from a floppy.
> 
> I have a Dell Poweredge, which won't boot from CD, so I need to use a 
> floppy. However, when I dd "linux24" to a floppy from the knoppix 
> boot/isolinux directory, it abends; "linux26" gives an error message 
> saying that "direct booting from floppy is no longer supported. Use a 
> boot manager...".
> 
> I tried to use Smart Boot Manager 
> (http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/download.html) on a floppy, but it doesn't 
> recognize the ATAPI CD-RW drive in my machine.
> 
> So, some questions:
> 
> * Are the files in boot/isolinux meant to be boot images? How do I put 
> them on a floppy so that they will?
> * What can I do to make the CD-RW drive visible? It's an "ATAPI" drive, 
> but doesn't seem to show up, at least for sbm.
> * How do I use GRUB for this? There are no initrd files on the cd, so 
> should I try the chainloader?
> 
> N.B. I've booted the CD on a machine that supports booting from CD, so 
> I'm sure I have a good copy. The BIOS in the Dell is up to date.
> 
> TIA.
> 
> Bill Horne
> 
> 
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