Linux BOOTy

[samwichse]

Ok, I've got a friend with a sony VAIO Laptop (PCG-Z505HS). It's one of those early "small and light" laptops with no internal floppy or CDROM drive. It does have an external floppy drive from which it's capable of booting, but the cdrom is a Hewlett Packard M820 SCSI CDRW attached to a custom HP PCMCIA card.

It's had the same limping windows 98 install on it the last few years, but no one has wanted to try and do a fresh install because DOS absolutely does NOT support this CD drive and so it's apparently impossible to reinstall win98. Plus it's on some of those awful restore disks with some kind of custom compression/extraction scheme.

So... I was wondering if it'd be possible to make some kind of linux boot floppy to install Linux on it (whatever flavor would work), or if someone knows something short of putting the hard drive into a desktop machine with an adapter to reinstall windows.

Sam

(P.S. I've tried knoppix, no dice)

[MadMan2k]

USB CD drive?

[bfcx]

what distro do you want to install? Ever distro has boot disks incase your cd rom isnt bootable.

[samwichse]

I've tried that with redhat, but the cdrom was not detected.

In the BIOS, the only boot options are:

ATAPI CD-ROM drive
Diskette Drive
Hard Drive

All you can do is reorder them. Sooo no usb cdrom????

[nukes]

Look in the directory containing the bootdisk images, there should be one for a PCMCIA cdrom drive.

[samwichse]

Ok, well I tried the fedora pcmciadd.img one, but no dice. However, the network one worked and so it's downloading stuff now. Thanks nukes, didn't know you could do that.

Sam

[Starfury_2260]

I recently got Mandrake 10, and the computer I went to put it on wouldn't boot from the cd's. On the first cd is a program (for Windows) called rawrite that turns a diskette into a boot disk that then installs from the cds. I would guess that other distros probably have something like that.

[samwichse]

yeah, that's what I did for the network boot.