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On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 21:53 +0100, Rob Beard wrote: > Hi folks, > > I'm in the process of sorting out an old laptop for a friend. It's a > few years old and the DVD drive doesn't work on it. It also doesn't > support booting from USB and the network adaptor is a Xircom PCMCIA card > which isn't supported by either Etherboot or gPXE. > > Now I'm a bit stuck. I can boot from floppy no problem, I've even tried > booting Grub which works, but then Grub (at least Grub version 1) > doesn't see the USB stick I have attached to the machine (I figured if I > can boot grub, I can then boot the kernel from a USB stick). That > however doesn't work. > > I've done a bit of searching and found that Debian 4 has a couple of > floppy boot images, I wondered though if there was anything for Debian > 5? (I'd rather not install Debian 4 then Debian 5 over the top of it). I've hatched a plan, actually it's a bit daft but worth a go. Make a dos boot floppy, I guess freedos would do. Boot into dos from the floppy. fdisk the harddisk, make a partition of a few meg, format it FAT16. Use the floppy to transfer the kernel and initrd of a network boot install onto the harddisk. split(1) the file into small enough parts to split onto the floppy and then recombine under dos with copy /b initrd.aa + initrd.ab + initrd.ac initrd.gz Then either boot it using grub or boot it from DOS using loadlin (http://youpibouh.thefreecat.org/loadlin/) Obviously this is entirely untested. Sophos Plc, The Pentagon, Abingdon Science Park, Abingdon, OX14 3YP, United Kingdom. Company Reg No 2096520. VAT Reg No GB 348 3873 20. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html