No boot from floppy

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Fox7777
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No boot from floppy

#1 Post by Fox7777 »

We have some Boeing Surplus Dell Optiplex GMT5133 computers model MMM, 1996 with anywhere from 64 to 128 MB RAM that we would like to install Puppy Linux on. Since these computers won't boot from a CD, we created the boot floppy which starts the CD and loads vmlinuz & image.gz. However it then goes to Starting Kernel followed by a blinking cursor and gets stuck there. We did read the no boot page but don't see the answer. What is the solution?

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BarryK
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#2 Post by BarryK »

Try Puppy 1.0.1 to see if it is a kernel problem.
1.0.1 uses a 2.4 kernel, 1.0.2 uses 2.6 kernel, and some people on older hardware have reported a problem with the upgrade.

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Fox7777
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Re: No boot from floppy

#3 Post by Fox7777 »

Success! We were able to boot Puppy 1.0.3 live on the above computers, install it & boot it with Grub. (Originally we mistakenly used a HD boot floppy rather than the live boot floppy- sorry). We could play videos with sound on the newer computers using Puppy 1.0.3 but haven't yet got it working on the older computers. Thanks for a great new release!
Last edited by Fox7777 on Fri 10 Jun 2005, 02:57, edited 1 time in total.

GuestToo
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#4 Post by GuestToo »

smart boot manager can boot cd's on many machines that can't boot cd's from the bios ... i have grub on my mbr, and can choose to boot from the cd by loading a smart boot manager floppy image using memdisk

http://btmgr.webframe.org/

http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm

st. petersburg linux uses sbm too
http://www.8ung.at/spblinux/

the floppy image can be used to make a floppy that can boot cd's on some machines ... or the image can be used to boot a cd from the hard drive (using memdisk)

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