Tim Tebbit wrote:
AG wrote:Cheers for the suggestions. I may well be up the proverbial creek with this one. Thanks for the tips re removing the screws - I'll give that a shot. Coincidentally - and a long shot - I found an old set of Win3.1 installation floppies whilst looking around for something I could use as a bootstrap boot disk. If I were to install Win3.1 (assuming that goes okay!), is there a way of then installing Debian given all of the constraints listed previously?You bet. http://goodbye-microsoft.com/
Would that work? win3.1 is 16 bit(there's an add-on for win3.1 for supporting 32bit exes..) .. debian.exe is a good bet but it might not have a 16bit routine.. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Win32s , is installable on win3.1 )
with debian.exe, once you get into the system, you can even choose the manual guided partition section and ask to resize the current fat16 partition..
to save time, you can also try checking out linux rescue disks from sites like http://www.bootdisk.com/ (there's rawdisk.exe which can write disk images to floppy).
i'm assuming you would be able to use at least iexplorer 3 or something with win 3.1.. it sure is a challenge but definitely possible ;) (it's likely you might have to copy win32s and iexplorer on diskettes somewhere)
the least hassle, if you're willing to pull a few gut cells then you can look into using a netboot disk.. there are netboot disk makers online.. in which u just have to enter your netcard make.. then copy that image to a floppy disk-> (tools like winimage, winhex, and rawdisk can do this)
since the linux rescue setup resides inside a remote server 'image'..for eg: the tftp server , you don't have to change anything on the netboot disk.. any changes thereafter would be done on the tftp server..
http://wiki.debian.org/Tftp :) jamesb