Old PC, no CD Boot, broken floppy
 

Hi.

I have an old PC that I'm preparing for someone and I want to install Puppy Linux onto it.

The Floppy is gash and the Bios only has options for booting from A: or C:.

The CD does not appear to be being picked up, but I'm not sure if this is the fault of the CD or that the necessary drivers are missing.

What I want to do is copy an operating system onto the C: drive using another PC, install the drive, boot the PC and install Puppy Linux from the CD (if it works) or the network.

Any tips? Can this be done?

it sounds like more trouble than it's worth.

Yes.

That's very helpful.

I live in South Africa where a number of people are not wealthy enough to simply junk a machine and throw it out onto the landfill site.

In my view Puppy Linux has a huge roll to play in developing countries where the latest hardware and cutting-edge applications are not as freely available as the are in the affluent West.

Whereas you might scorn these underpowered machines, they can still be useful to others not quite as wealthy as you would appear to be.

apologies. but I am not a mind-reader ;)

well, you don't actually install puppy linux.
also AFAIK puppy always needs a bootstrap from a USB or CDROM so if it
won't boot from CD it never will work.
though of course it may be possible, but looking at the site the documentation for HD install appears to be missing.
(I am also a big fan of puppy and use it a lot)

Also remember, puppy runs in RAM, and as you say times are hard, so I would assume RAM
is hard to come by too. Therefore I would say it's probably better to get a nice
distro that runs on disk and is designed for low-end hardware like Xubuntu maybe?


I think in your case where the CD doesn't boot you could use a floppy install instead
or if you say you have another machine first try swapping out the CD to see if will boot
with that. Otherwise try as you say installing it first.

It may work as I've swapped out a whole motherboard once and linux still started
using the same disk!

Apologies accepted. Sorry if I was a little touchy there!

Yes, the route I'm thinking of taking is using another machine to install on and swapping the Hard Drive. Not too sure if this will work, but I can only give it a go.

I was wondering if there was a way of using the hard drive to boot up with (maybe FreeDOS), and then trying to install from a network, or the CD.

I know that you can do it using WakePup with a floppy; perhaps a small partition on the HD instead to get the CD/Network up and running?

look here at the post by pixelstuff, might get you started with the puppy startup

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-448509.html

Here's what I do
 

I configure a lot of old PCs for charity. If the old PC can not boot off its CD-ROM, I use either of 2 techniques --

(1) I have another PC I keep the cover off of. I simply take out the disk drive from the old PC and attach it to this one (an old Pentium II with 256M of RAM). Then I boot off the CD I want to install (like Puppy or Damn Small Linux) and install it to the disk. Then put the disk back into your target PC. Works like a charm. Just take care when attaching the cables not to bend any pins or anything.

(2) Another alternative is to get the Smart Boot Manager (SBM). You create a boot floppy with this tool, and boot off the floppy. It then allows you to boot off the CD. You can get it here -- http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/.

There are other techniques as well but I usually use these two and both work fine.

A new floppy drive is dirt cheap.

Yes, new floppies around here are maybe 10 $US... I bought a used one at a computer show for 5 $US once, or you could just even cannabalize one from some other old or non-working PC. 3" floppies haven't changed since they were introduced 20+ years ago so any floppy from any PC will work.

Meanwhile, tell us if the cross-connection idea works for you in installing to the hard-drive.

Hi - do you have Windows installed on the computer? If so, you can boot into Windows and then copy the contents of the WakePup2 startup floppy disk onto the C: drive via the network. Reboot into MS-DOS (set a config.sys file to load a CD-ROM driver) and use the LINLD application to boot puppy from the CD-ROM. You can then do a full install of puppy (including wiping Windows from the drive) using the Universal Installer from the setup menu.
I had the same problem as you (old computer with no floppy or CD boot) but managed to get puppy installed using this method.

Unfortunatly not.

However, freedos would probably work okay?

Maybe I can copy the freedos system files onto the hard drive to boot it up.

I've not had any experience with FreeDOS but you'd certainly be able to do the wakepup2 step with it if you managed to get it installed.

cov, let me summarize it:
neither floppy nor cdrom work. usb boot option is not available either.

in that case, how are you going to get freedos onto the laptop? does the laptop have functioning network card?

if it does have network, one option you have is booting via TFTP, i did this with a number of LiveCD's and it worked. however, you will need another computer working as a TFTP server and PXE boot support on your laptop

hth

cheers

Chooselife - his CD-ROM works, he just doesn't have the option to boot from CD in the BIOS