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Paul Hirst wrote:
Ahh that might be well worth a try. I certainly haven't got anything to loose anyway.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.
Rob -- 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