Guest khoskin Posted November 28, 2002 Report Share Posted November 28, 2002 I'm a "relative" newbie and I've had mandrake working for sometime on other systems, but I want to install Mandrake on an old Pentium I motherboard (circa 1995), that refuses to boot from the Floppy drive (it's faulty), and could never boot from the CDROM . It will boot from the Hard disk though. I can put the HD in another machine that is running Mandrake 8.2 , but how should I partition / install LILO / copy across the files from the CDROM on this HD whilst it's in the other machine so that I can eventually get this drive to boot and install mandrake when I place it in the machine with the faulty floppy drive ? The HD is 60GB in size , so copy across all the CDs is not a problem, and I've got a PCI IDE interface for it to get around motherboard limitations. any help would be greatly appreciated. cheers Karl Hoskin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
qeldroma Posted November 28, 2002 Report Share Posted November 28, 2002 Do you have a network connection between them? That would be by far the easiest way. There is a boot-image for installing via network on the cdrom. Just read the readme, it explains the generation of the floppy. Then you can install via NFS/FTP/HTTP. Another way is a local partition, then you'll have to take the harddisk image. There you can choose the partition to install from, locally. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest khoskin Posted November 28, 2002 Report Share Posted November 28, 2002 qeldroma, thanks for your answer... I can get a network card in the machine. The problem is I can't boot from a floppy or cdrom , because the floppy boot doesn't work, and the motherboard could never boot from cdrom. (I've tried a known working floppy drive , floppy data cable, power lead, but it seems the fault is with the motherboard / bios. I've even tried flashing the bios ) I've got a cdrom in the machine, but since the bios doesn't directly support booting from cdrom, some sort of OS is going to have to be loaded to get to this drive. Will the local partition way you mention totally avoid having to use the floppy drive? Because unless it does, I'm stuck. many thanks Karl H. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest khoskin Posted November 30, 2002 Report Share Posted November 30, 2002 I've managed to do this now. Basically I had to put the HD (removing other HD's as a precaution so I didn't fdisk the wrong drive by accident ) in another machine with a working floppy drive. Partition and format a small (100M) partition on the HD with FAT16 (must be FAT 16 or even FAT12, and NOT FAT32), making it the active partition with DOS fdisk. Run SYSLINUX (from http://syslinux.zytor.com/ ) on this drive with the command :- syslinux c: run the the dos command on this HD:- fdisk /mbr make a linux floppy boot disk with rawwrite that would boot from a cdrom. copy all these files , except the LDLINUX.SYS, from a: to c: (it needed the LDLINUX.SYS that was installed when SYSLINUX was run) test that it works by putting Mandrake Install cdrom 1 in the cd drive, and the HD should boot to the installation cd without a floppy disk in site!! Put the HD back in the machine with the faulty floppy, and put the Mandrake cd rom 1 in the cd drive, boot and install Mandrake! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
qeldroma Posted November 30, 2002 Report Share Posted November 30, 2002 ;-) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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