Problems booting from floppy

[Fritz_Monroe]

I'm a newbie to Linux and just happened upon Puppy. So far it looks great. I've been able to boot off of CD on one of my systems to play around a little. I decided it looked good to me, so wanted to try it on one of my other boxes that won't boot from CD. I used rawrite to create the floppy and booted up.

First off, it didn't find the CD, but that was my fault, I put it in the wrong CD tray, so I edited the autoexec.bat file to point to H: instead. This time, it started reading the CD loaded up vmlinuz, and went on to the image.gz. The machine reboots. I took a better look into the autoexec.bat and found that it was writing to 256 Meg of memory, I only have 192 Meg here, so there's another change. I figured I had it straightened out, but on boot up it did the exact same thing, rebooted when loading image.gz.

I also tried it on this computer's brother, same everything except 1 DVD-ROM and no CD. Exact same results.

So, any suggestions? I'm open to anything.

F_M

[Ian]

You could try creating a swap partition to overcome the lack of memory if that is the problem.

[Fritz_Monroe]

I'm hoping to avoid making anything permanent. I need to verify that this old machine will run linux, and that I can find the drivers for all the parts. I built these machines from parts, and since money was short, I went as generic as I could. So, it's possible this could be pretty tough to get running.

F_M

[Ian]

A swap partition doesn't have to be permnent, but if you have an old hard drive just fit it for the time being and create a swap partition on that.
It only needs to be about 128M.

[Bruce B]

There is an easier and more effective way to boot a computer from CD-ROM which doesn't have the BIOS support to do it.

I've attached a file called OLDBIOS.ZIP - It contains a floppy disk image of a disk which will boot to the A: drive then transfer control to boot from the CD-ROM

I've also included a freeware DOS utility called FIRM to write the floppy disk in DOS - you can use rawrite also but I think FIRM is better.

I expect this will solve the reboot problem you were having.

[John3333]

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but can you just verify one thing?
If I copy this to a floppy, does that mean that the floppy will boot and then direct my computer to the CD, without touching the hard drive or writing one little thing (even to the first track) of my hard drive?
In other words, will the hard drive remain 100% untouched when I boot using the floppy?

[Flash]

I'm almost certain that your hard drive will remain untouched, but you can try unplugging it and then booting the CD with the floppy if you really, really want to be sure.

[Bruce B]

I'm almost certain that your hard drive will remain untouched, but you can try unplugging it and then booting the CD with the floppy if you really, really want to be sure.

Oldbios transfers control straight from the floppy to the CD-ROM. You want to have the boot sequence in your bios to look to the floppy as the first boot device.

Also, for first setup you don't 'copy' the file to the floppy. You use the image and tools included to write the floppy disk.

Enjoy!

[Lobster]

I've also included a freeware DOS utility called FIRM to write the floppy disk in DOS - you can use rawrite also but I think FIRM is better.

I expect this will solve the reboot problem you were having.

I still have this strange vision of fd0: Puppy
- Fido Puplet

Barry put the 2.6 kernel on a single floppy
but the 2.4 might be better - as maybe a 2 floppy system
I used the elinks browser to browse the web and enter
this forum - how big is that?

Here are the suggested specs of FD0: Puplet

generated from an on line script
Boots from floppy
set up internet connection
enters (a yet to be created) page on the wiki
offers specialised dotpups
comes with [progs dependent on script]

Sorry to be off topic
- normal service is now resumed . . .

[papaschtroumpf]

anyone knows of something equivalent to boot oof the CD-ROM and transfer control to the USB drive?

My main puppy (heavily customized 1.0.3 based liveCD) is on a USB "pen" drive. I ran into one laptop that couldn't boot from USB and didn't have a floppy drive: if I had a small ISO on the USB drive I could burn it to a CD then boot from that CD and transfer control to puppy.

Right now my only solution is to carry around the entire image of my puppy liveCD so that I can boot from it but still have my PHOME on sda1. Fortunately my USB drive is 1G so the 60M ISO is peanuts in terms of space used.