Help: Installing without a floppy drive?

nuance9 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Sep 2002 Posts: 85

I purchased an old Toshiba Portege 660CDT and would like to try putting Gentoo on it very much. The problem is that the BIOS does not support booting from CD, and I do not have a floppy drive for this laptop.

I tried creating a FAT partition and dropping the files from the CD into it and then attempted to boot to that using a boot manager - but it didn't recognize it.

Any ideas? Currently windows 95 is also residing on the system.

Thanks for any help!

Justin Pease

delta407 · Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2002 2:21 am Post subject:

Can you netboot as described in this document? Failing that, can you build a base system on some other machine and use Ghost or some such tool to image it over the network? Can you transplant the hard drive to some other machine? Attach any other bootable media?

If any of the above, you can certainly load Gentoo. If not, well, there should still be other ways -- they just won't be as easy.

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nuance9 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Sep 2002 Posts: 85

Thanks for the reply.

It seems like there should be some way to transfer the CD image to the hard drive and boot from that . . . but I guess not?

Admittedly I don't know much about the boot process - but it just seems like if it has the info to boot it shouldn't matter on what media the data is located.

With the Ghost idea, or the HD transplant idea - how far into the install can you get before you start applying machine specific options?

Unfortunately the only boot options with the BIOS is either a HD or the floppy. I will check on Ebay and see if I can find a reasonable price on a floppy. I just hate to spend as much on a floppy drive as I did on the entire laptop!

Any other ideas are also welcome!

pilla · Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2002 3:11 am Post subject:

I remeber something which could boot from a windows computer.... it was a DOS program... I just don't remember the name! You could find it in some earlier distros...

EDIT: This looks interesting, too

http://www.partimage.org/

fghellar · Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2002 4:21 am Post subject:

Do you mean loadlin?
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pilla · Posted: Tue Sep 10, 2002 2:11 pm Post subject:

Yes, I mean.... maybe it can help.

nuance9 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Sep 2002 Posts: 85

I will give loadlin a try. Thanks, if it works - it sounds exactly like what I am looking for.

- JP

nuance9 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Sep 2002 Posts: 85

Never could get Loadlin to work ... but I found this post:

https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=8690&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

Smart Boot Manager worked like a charm.

Man if I had this much trouble booting, what am I gonna do once I get this install started!?

Thanks for all the help!

- Justin

arkane · l33t Joined: 30 Apr 2002 Posts: 918 Location: Phoenix, AZ

I have a silly question...
what happens once windows blows up?

(you don't have cd boot ability, and no floppy)

pjp · Administrator Joined: 16 Apr 2002 Posts: 20067

nuance9 · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Sep 2002 Posts: 85

arkane -

yeah, not exactly ideal - but for $100 it is going to be pretty cool to have a nice little laptop running Gentoo!

but actually, I think Smart Boot Manager (http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/) installs to the MBR - so if *excuse me* WHEN windows does blow up we CAN celebrate!

Again, thanks everybody for your help!

- Justin

baz · n00b Joined: 21 Jun 2002 Posts: 9