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How do I make a boot floppy to install Gentoo from the CD.
I want to learn Linux but can't find the info to do this. I have Linux installed on a 1Ghz machine with Mandrake 10.0 but I didn't learn much from doing that automatic GUI type install.
PC I want Gentoo on:
I have an old IBM 233 with a non bootable CDROM drive. (IBM Industrial 7588 with 128 Meg of RAM, 4 Gig HD) The BIOS has CD boot settings but it will not boot with any bootable OS CD I have tried. Currently it has Win98SE installed and the CDROM drive reads OK. The Drive is a Sony CDU611-F firmware ver 2.1b
I want to install Gentoo from the newest distributions available. I have the Live 2004 CD, Boot CD, and all of the Stages on CD.
ph34r
04-08-2004, 09:41 AM
You need a DOS bootable disk that has CDROM support/drivers on it, a copy of loadlin.exe on it, the appropriate kernel image from the install cd, and the path to the initrd file on the cd as well. Then you can use loadlin like
loadlin kernel_image_filename initrd=d:\path\to\initrd
The kernel image can be on the cd as well, you just need to supply the path to it the same way you do for the initrd file.
And that should be it.
JohnT
04-08-2004, 09:42 AM
Look on your cd and see if it contains a folder with the rawrite utilities, if so you might be able to make a working bootdisk using these instructions as a rough guide.
http://www.caldera.com/support/docs/openlinux/3.1/OLinstallD/bgbbfied.html
XiaoKJ
04-08-2004, 10:11 AM
Check out the Gentoo website.
Its ftp server would have a directory /boot that has boot.img and root.img which is what you want. I am recalling this so I am not quite accurate.
The CD should have this also, which you can use winimage for windows to make the boot disks.
You can also make grub floppies that can boot multiple items, like booting many linux distros over many computers. Its quite useful if you know the grub command lines. Check out its website for details.
Remember to read the Gentoo installation instructions or you will face a guranteed failure as the learning curve is rather steep from Mandrake to Gentoo. I suggest Slackware that explains each move for installation.
Edit: If you try my grub floppy, you must know that bootable CDs have a floppy disk image that emulates the boot disk when it is needed to boot. Thus you will have to find the boot disk image and run it to boot, or maybe just chainload. I haven't tried that yet!
mdwatts
04-08-2004, 11:56 AM
Originally posted by XiaoKJ
Check out the Gentoo website.
Its ftp server would have a directory /boot that has boot.img and root.img which is what you want. I am recalling this so I am not quite accurate.
The CD should have this also, which you can use winimage for windows to make the boot disks.
Exactly !!!
And you should find README's to explain how to create the bootdisks.