Use Smart Boot Manager on floppy to boot CD

[syzygy]

not sure if this is right place to post but, am volunteering for a computer bank group, fixing them &
installing ubuntu, then they're to be given away for nix, and occasionally we come across old/buggy bios that doesn't support cdrom boot.

if you download the smart boot manager linux binary, sbminst, from:

http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/3.7/sbminst

then do ./sbminst -t us -d /dev/fd0 to create a bootable floppy,

or you can download sbootmgr.dsk from:

http://public.www.planetmirror.com/pub/ ... ootmgr.dsk

then use dd if=sbootmgr.dsk of=/dev/fd0 under linux, or use rawrite for windows with:

c:\rawrite sbootmgr.dsk a:

then when you reboot the floppy it gives you the option of cdrom boot.

occasionally i've come across it not giving the cdrom boot option, then if you bring up the sbm system menu by pressing <tab>, then select set cdrom ports <enter>, 1F0,3F6 <enter>, then click rescan all drives , and, hey presto, there's your cdrom boot option. i've used this for several pc's where the bios wasn't
even aware of the cdrom drive!

you can also use sbootmgr.dsk, with memdisk.bin from syslinux, to enable cdrom booting with grub:-


title cdrom
kernel (hd0,0)/boot/grub/memdisk.bin
initrd (hd0,0)/boot/grub/sbootmgr.dsk

the sourceforge page of smart boot manager is: http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/

[Lobster]

Have placed the info here

http://puppylinux.org/wikka/BootingFromCD