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| Thread ID: 49375 | 2004-09-17 09:31:00 | Booting from a CD without a bootdisk. | willie_M (5608) | Press F1 |
| Post ID | Timestamp | Content | User | ||
| 273214 | 2004-09-17 13:05:00 | > ok, > > I want to boot from the cd drive. Which of course you have asked before. > > floppy disks suck, I cannot be forked forking around > with them. > > The computer normally boots into win95 from the hard > drive OK. Understood that. > > The BIOS doesn't have the feature to boot from CD I worked that out as well. > > I am able to get into command prompt through the > win95 bootmenu > > I have enabled the cd drive (not using mscdex but > installing drivers through dos) > > I want to boot from command prompt.... maybe I should > have just asked that. You can't boot from a command line prompt or a command prompt. Your original message tended to indicate that you wanted to install DSL which does not need to be installed. As I see it you need a method of getting an operating system of any sort on to the hard drive. At the moment we know that the hard drive will boot if you don'r "fork" about with it. As I see it if you want to BOOT then you need a bootable drive. A floppy will not work as you say. You cant boot off a CDRom drive as you say. DSL ( Damn Small Linux) is not meant to be installed on a Hard disk. Being as you have access to the Hard drive via a dos prompt does the hard drive have two or more partitions? You have access to a CDRom drive but not bootable If so you can copy a whole CD to the D drive as you tell me you have a hard drive which works and boots in Win95 > So since its not looking good for booting from CLI, > how else, apart from using floppies, or flashing bios > could i boot. > > Could I append something to AUTOEXEC.BAT to make it > point to the CD? > > Could I get to the boot partition and insert the boot > files for the cd and just put the bastard on the hard > drive? No. Not with DSL. You cant even boot with DSL on your 486. |
Elephant (599) | ||
| 273215 | 2004-09-18 04:02:00 | The BOOT.IMG, and BOOT.CAT are "probably" the files which make the CD bootable. BOOT.IMG is the floppy disk image which can be written (as an image, not a file :D) to a floppy to do the normal floppy start. If you can boot the machine in DOS, and it will handle the CD, you could try getting an installation CD for Red Hat (which I provides this) and looking in DOSUTILS (and that rough area) for LOADLIN.EXE and the batcj files which (I think called AUTOBOOT.BAT). Copy those to the hard disk, and modify the batch file to go to the CD (the one with the live system) instead of a kernel held on the hard disk (which is the usual way of using loadlin). I'm not sure how it would cope with the live compressed Live image ;-). Perhaps you should use loadlin to load the Boot.img file from the hard disk. Aha. B-) That should work, it is just a kernel with the bootstrap routine to boot it. Rather than go back and delete things I have written already, I'll leave it as is as an exercise fior the reader. But I'll summarize. :D Boot to DOS. Run loadlin.exe, with the appropriate syntax (as given in the original batch file which RH give you) to load the boot.img file, which you have also copied to the HD. That "should" then happily look at the CD for the live Linux. Or it might fall over. :D I It might be easier to get a second-hand floppy and use Rawrite (or [b]dd on a Linux system) to put BOOT.IMG on it. :D |
Graham L (2) | ||
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