Re: Old BIOS does not support booting from cdrom

[dman <dsh8290@rit.edu>]

On Wed, Aug 29, 2001 at 03:11:10PM -0400, Ken Mead wrote:
| Hi all,
| 
| I was given on old P166 and want to put Debian on it however the old BIOS 
| does not support bootable cd's. Can someone please point/help me make a 
| floppy disk that will allow me to boot my debian cd so I can get this box 
| running. I would go and get the floppy images but I only 
| have one floppy left.

There are several options you have :
    The easiest is probably to just temporarily move the hard disk to
    a new machine and install from CD there, then move the drive back.

    You could try building a boot disk that could boot from the CD
    (maybe grub can do this, I'm not sure).

    You could get the rescue.bin and root.bin floppy images and do a
    "network install" that way.  I suppose if you have 2 machines and
    only 1 floppy you could make the rescue disk and start booting.
    When it asks for the root disk you could take the rescue out and
    make it a root disk, then put it back in.  If need be this could
    (probably) be done for the other drivers and/or base disks if you
    want to try a complete install from floppies.

When I installed on an old 486 I did the first option.

I just remembered, though -- the CD has loadlin on it.  If you can
boot to pure DOS (no 'doze) and read the CD (I couldn't on that 486)
you could use loadlin to reboot into Debian.

HTH,
-D