[TriLUG] installing FC2 without boot floppy - was How may GB ...

Jeremy Portzer jeremyp at pobox.com
Thu Oct 28 15:52:19 EDT 2004


On Thu, 2004-10-28 at 15:34, Rob Lockhart wrote:

> 
> Talking about Fedora Core 2, it is impossible to believe that there is
> no boot floppy available.  

I don't understand why that's impossible to believe.  The 2.6 kernel
simply is too big to fit on a floppy and still have room for any
user-land code.  A floppy is only 1.44 MB, that's a very small amount
compared to the complexity of the 2.6 kernel.

Fedora Core 2 and the 2.6 kernel are designed for modern hardware; it's
not unexpected to find out that you'd have problems with dinosaurs. 
Either work around the problems or use an older distribution that was
designed for that hardware.

> I was going to try and install it at work
> on an old Dell (i586 200MMX, 128MB RAM), to serve as a lab
> DHCP/BOOTP/HTTP server.  It says with the newer BIOS that if you
> specify "Floppy", it actually first tries the floppy drive, then PnP
> CD-ROM, then hard drive (whatever PnP CDROM is).  It doesn't seem to
> work, as it doesn't boot from CD-ROM with a Centos-3 boot CD I made
> (Centos requires i686 and 256MB RAM).  

I assume there is no specific "CD-ROM" option in the BIOS based on that
description?  It was pretty common in the 200Mhz days to have CD-ROM
booting; I'm surprised it's not an explicit option.

As far as recent distros that will work without problems -- I'd suggest
CentOS 2.1, or FC1 with the Fedora Legacy project (which uses a 2.4
kernel and has a floppy boot option IIRC.)

I think you could also boot from the network (PXE?) with an
appropriately configured ethernet card with boot ROM, but I don't know
the details of that.  There are also "etherboot" floppies that simulate
this if you don't have the boot ROM.

> another
> had a bunch of loadlin stuff (presuming you had an extra FAT32
> bootable partition on the hard drive, then it would be blown away
> after install?).

This should work fine, but I agree it's convoluted.

Regards,
Jeremy

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