Booting Knoppix from floppy

Bill Horne bill at horne.net
Tue Jan 4 09:06:11 EST 2005


Thanks for reading this: I need help booting Knoppix from a floppy.

I have a Dell Poweredge, which won't boot from CD, so I need to use a 
floppy. However, when I dd "linux24" to a floppy from the knoppix 
boot/isolinux directory, it abends; "linux26" gives an error message 
saying that "direct booting from floppy is no longer supported. Use a 
boot manager...".

I tried to use Smart Boot Manager 
(http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/download.html) on a floppy, but it doesn't 
recognize the ATAPI CD-RW drive in my machine.

So, some questions:

* Are the files in boot/isolinux meant to be boot images? How do I put 
them on a floppy so that they will?
* What can I do to make the CD-RW drive visible? It's an "ATAPI" drive, 
but doesn't seem to show up, at least for sbm.
* How do I use GRUB for this? There are no initrd files on the cd, so 
should I try the chainloader?

N.B. I've booted the CD on a machine that supports booting from CD, so 
I'm sure I have a good copy. The BIOS in the Dell is up to date.

TIA.

Bill Horne





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