I am trying to install Mandrake 10 on my old Pentium 75 / 64MB / 5.4GB box circa 1995. I am planning on running a basic install with a "light" window manager like IceWM or something similar.

This computer will not boot from a cd so I followed the procedure to make a boot floppy. It loads the installer and everything is fine until it tries to access the cd. It spits out the following error. Error: No CDROM device found. then it says "Please insert the Additional Drivers floppy" What do I need to make a drivers floppy?

Thanks

Hi, nice experience !!

Your cd rom is probably too old for Mdk, tried once with the same kind of computer ... and don't get far.

Let me know.

Well, I think I'm going to try Debian or Slack now. I would like some experience with something other than a RPM based system.

Thanks for the heads up.

Some (many?) PCs made back then used non-ATAPI CD drives that required special drivers. The DOS/Windows boot floppies for them installed the driver with their autexec.bat booter so the CD would work and you could get Windows installed. I don't know if any of those old CDs had Linux drivers. I discovered that problem when I wanted to try Redhat 5.2, i think.

Your best bet might be to replace your non-ATAPI CD drive with a standard one, maybe with a CD burner while you're at it. They're about $50 USD and if you get rid of the old system you can put the old CD drive back in.

I decided to go with a network install instead. Ill let you know how it turns out.

I borrowed the dvd drive out another system, and I'm still not having any luck.

Wow, did the dvd drive actually work in the Pentium 75MHz? I could be misinformed, but I've heard DVDs only work with 350MHz machines and above.

I've got a 100MHz Compaq Deskpro 1.1Gb HDD with 40mb RAM that I was able to install Red Hat 7.2. There is no option for BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM, so it had to be via floppy boot. The install recognized the CD-ROM drive and CDs without a problem.

When I got Mandrake, I tried to install it via floppy boot - but it just didn't recognize the CD-ROM no matter what I tried. Like you, I think the next step is to try a network install. Later I will try SuSE Linux 9.1 and see how that goes too.

Well I still have Win98 installed on that box, and it recognized teh dvd drive, and it read cdrom's just fine.

So, same here, no matter what I do, MDK wont recognize the drive. I will try later, with the dvd, I just havent tried yet.

Ill let you know.