install on new computer; no cd available
Hello,
I've tried searching the archives for this but am still unclear.
My main computer (P-II) died suddenly. I have backups so that's ok.
I got my old computer (486) running (so I can send this email and carry
on with life) but it cant' run my CD burner and with an ISA bus, it
can't do USB.
I'm building a new computer:
AMD Athlon 64 X2, AM2
Asus M2N-SLI board with nVidia nForce 570 chipset
1 GB stick of ECC ram
basic video
SATA 80 GB Seagate Barricuda drive.
Zip drive (most recent backups on Zips).
LG CD/DVD burner.
Could add a floopy if it would help.
The last installation media I have is 3.0 (full CD set, and all
floppy images and basedebs tarball on Zip disk, with backups, in the
bank (CDs don't fit).
The one thing in my backup/recovery plan I forgot was that SATA wasn't
around when 3.0 was made.
My 486 can do two or three things:
1. Download and make floppies. Is there any forcast when Etch
will have floppy-install working? With woody, I tested that
I could boot from floppy then install base off the zip.
2. Make zips. On my old computers, I haven't been able to
get a grub floppy to boot something on the zip. With 96 MB
available, is there an iso file I can put on it?
3. I may be able to find an old IDE disk and put stuff there
for a hard disk install and use a grub boot-disk to boot,
but I don't know if IDE hard-disk boot works on this main
board, since its really for ATAPI CDROM drives.
My 486 is shoehorned on a small hard drive since the P-II took my other
drives with it. I don't think I have enough room to run NFSd although
it does run ssh.
Confounding all this is that I'm on dialup in the country. I would like
to know what specifically to download and try, rather than downloading
everything. Since downloading images takes so long, and CPU prices are
coming down, I havn't actually got the guts of the computer yet; I want
to have a plan to install before I buy it (I have the case, PSU, SATA,
and my zip and burner installed).
Is there anyway to bootstrap the bootstrap; boot up with the 3.0 CD
(assuming it boots), then from the shell of the installer memu have it
transfer to (rather than boot) the Etch installer iso on a zip disk?
Some sort of swtich-root as opposed to chroot?
Any other ideas? I would really like floppy booting to work since I can
make those on my 486.
Thanks,
Doug
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