Re: Installing on Compaq Armada 1500c - boot
On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 07:51:06PM +0100, Nuno Magalh??es wrote:
> I have this old laptop laying around. Currently is has no CD drive and
> i'd hate to rely on floppies. It does have a working PCMCIA eth card
> and a minimal OpenBSD that sees my LAN.
>
> I can't access its BIOS and i doubt it has one... these laptops used
> to have the bios in a hdd partition and this one got a new drive a
> while ago. So, i'm kinda stranded on that but i doubt it supported PXE
> (my initial idea) anyway. The floppies i have laying around for the
> bios utilities are kinda corrupted and won't help much - creating a
> new bios partition would require unalocated diskspace anyway. Any
> suggestions for giving this laptop a bios would be appreciated.
>
> So then i decided maybe the bootloader could support PXE or some other
> form of booting, but i'm still searching for BSD stuff on that
> matter...
I'm assuming that you can't boot a USB stick.
The OpenBSD install floppy can give you a shell running OpenBSD in
memory. From within that, you can probably get your network going. You
should then be able to repartition the hard drive (using fdisk) to clear
out the OpenBSD install. Then install debootstrap and run it. It
should pull in a basic Debian system and install it on the drive. See
the installation manual for the use of debootstrap (installing from
another flavour of UNIX).
You may want to dd a copy of grub-disk (its a debian package) that gives
you a grub menu (editable) for booting an OS.
Doug.
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