Boot a liveCD via floppy?

Lately I have been working on many older notebooks (266mhz) that do not boot from the cd, ideally I would like to boot into some slackware liveCD distors (DSL et al) with a floppy boot disk.
I can load drivers for the cd to run from a DOS prompt but how does one get those live CD’s to boot?

Is there a script command I can type at the command prompt c:\ or am I barking up the wrong tree completely here.

Even some info on how people used to install linux before these liveCD’s became the norm would be great, I cant seem to find anything.

 

I believe you can boot from floppy - just remember that your average floppy stores 1.4 MB. You're not installing Xubuntu here.

If you want something feature rich, I'd try booting from a USB drive instead.

 

A LiveCD or Live media of any kind will not fit on a floppy disk. A LiveCD is 700MB on avg, while a floppy disk is 1.44MB. I think you'd have to put Linux on several floppies, and even then there would be no GUI.

Get with the times, man!

 

..Even Damn Small Linux is 50 MB.

That'd be, like, 36 floppy disks.



Is this pre-USB? Find an old Jazz drive. No, Wait. Can a boot CD even run off a Jazz drive?

 

Nonono sorry, maybe I didn’t word it correctly.
I realize the capacity for floppies.

I would like to install something like, say, Puppy (80 odd MB) that I have on a liveCD.
But the CD wont boot, it cannot boot on these old notebooks.
So I was wondering if I can boot via my floppy disc to the cd drive and activate some “Start” command and install Puppy or other.

I can get to the CD via boot disc tools I have, the CD just wont boot from startup, the bios ver only allows FDD>HDD>LAN < they are the parameters I can work with.

I am guessing the only way is to copy the kernel and core to the HDD and set up with complex commands I don’t yet know.

 

It was clear enough. I understood right away what you meant.

There are multiple ways to do it. Unfortunately, I cannot give you the steps for any of them because it has been too long since I've done this. But the general methods are:

1. Use a DOS floppy to boot into DOS and then run a tool which will boot Linux off of the CD ROM. Search for syslinux on the web or install it and its documentation on another Linux system. (It is already packaged for Ubuntu.)

2. Create a Linux boot floppy appropriate for your distribution. In the days when computers had CD players but did not boot from them, this was the main way to install from a CD. Check your distribution's documentation.

3. Boot from the network. You mentioned your BIOS allows it. This is a bit complicated though because you need to setup a boot server.

4. Boot from a USB stick. (You can't use this one but I'm mentioning it for completeness.)

5. Boot from your HD. (I'm skipping details because I think syslinux is probably easier.)

There are probably other ways but that's all I can think of.

 

Some Linux distros support an install from floppy option. Debian is one example, and O'Reilly publishes a book on Debian, (ebook only), which describes the boot from floppy process here. Gentoo also has a Howto on their wiki that offers various suggestions for installing Linux without being able to boot from CD. Some suggestions are booting a floppy version of Linux, like the older 2.4 kernel based BG-Rescue and 2-Disk Xwindow embedded Linux, or the newer 2.6 kernel based, Arlinux.

I think that if you are going to do this often, it may be worth your time to setup a PXE, (Preboot Execution Environment), server installation environment for your favorite Linux distro. There's a good explanation of Linux PXE boot here, and the good news is that you don't have to have a PXE capable ethernet port to install from a PXE server. You can also use Etherboot. It should be relatively easy to find documentation on how to setup your favorite Linux distro as a PXE server, including Gentoo and Ubuntu.

Good Luck..

 

It's called a live CD for a reason man

And I don't know if it's possible to do what you're thinking. Use a USB stick?

 

Cheers for the help Jas & Lemur!

I have been considering the network install since they can all boot from LAN, and I have an old SPARC Sun-4 that will act as my server. I just need to learn a new language, that’s the intimidating part, but the challenge seems fun. Breathing life into these old ThinkPad’s, they’re too beautiful to let them die a windows death.

I like what I am reading about syslinux, thanks for that info – it may be my way to go.
And I will begin investigating the links provided by Jas.

The author of Puppy will send me an email regarding an execute script to add to the LiveCD, hopefully it may boot via the floppy, he too is curious about my progress. I may make a video for others.

In any event I’ll spend my week off reading up and experimenting, if I nail down a method I’ll do my best to post what works for me.

synic USB was born when 96? these notebooks dont have it, not even a circa 99 thinkpad 600.

 

Try Smart BootManager. It's a floppy image that will allow you to boot from CD.

 

Why thanks Srunni, that might save the day.
I am having problems of all sorts, still nothing to report, i'll do it though!

cheers!