Hello Michael. Thanks for your very welcome message and assistance. Yep, it looks as though the only USB hardware that my bios understands during setup or boot is the USB floppy drive that came with the laptop. The bios' USB legacy setting does affect the ability to boot as you have correctly indicated, but only for the recognized floppy drive. I tried connecting other USB devices such as cameras and memory card readers, but nothing seems to interest the bios except the floppy drive. That being the case, then I'm not all that confident that booting from an external USB CD drive would achieve success. Happily there may be a simpler solution. I had a quick look at the PXE server idea that you proposed too, Michael. This is a new concept for me, and I'll come back to it for a better appreciation when I get a quiet moment. I think it could be installed on an old FC10 system that I haven't run much for a while now, though I came to a point where the setup complexity began to look excessive, especially when contrast against temporarily shifting the laptop hard drive to a USB bootable machine for the installation, then hoping it remains operational when transferred back to the laptop. Well, both plans have their drawbacks, though I think a more satisfactory work-around may exist. When I copied the Net installation iso of Fedora to my USB flash drive using the Fedora LiveUSB creator, I noticed that the pre-existing FAT32 filesystem on the thumb drive had been unaltered, and that DOS readable files for the live image and Network installation had been added in 4-new directories. Presumably some sort of boot loader, that is able to read the FAT32 filesystem files, was added to the boot sector region of the flash drive. As soon as I am able to recreate this mystery boot loader's installation process for a FAT32 formatted IDE drive, then the problem is licked. It's no effort to boot the laptop from a Windows98 rescue disk using the floppy drive, create a temporarily bootable DOS partition for the Net installation files, and then given the bios' legacy USB support will allow, merely copy the appropriate installation directories and files from the thumb drive to the hard disk. Install the boot loader, and away you go. Okay, so who can tell me which bootloader is written into a thumb drive's boot sector, when the Fedora LiveUSB Creator tool prepares a USB flash drive using one of the installation iso images? Very long winded, sorry. Thanks for the read, and for any contributions toward consideration and resolution of the matter. T.
From: Michael D. Setzer II mikes@kuentos.guam.net To: M de Luis gimme_the_giffs@yahoo.com Sent: Wednesday, 2 January 2013 1:30 PM Subject: Re: Boot with 1.44" Floppy, then net install from thumb drive?
A couple of questions. Are you 100% that it will not boot from a flash? Many bios require that a flash has to be plugged in to the system to actually select it as a boot device. Second, you may have to set an option for legacy USB as well.
On another issue, it might be worth seeing if you could get an USB external CDROM and perhaps have it boot from that.
Don't think a floppy would be able to load any linux kernel. You might be able to get a boot loader link syslinux or grub4dos, but don't know what it would require to then pass control to a usb.
If it has network boot, you could setup a PXE server, but that seems to be a lot of setup and requirements. Would suggest looking into the bios options and usb cdrom.
On 1 Jan 2013 at 19:48, M de Luis wrote:
Date sent: Tue, 1 Jan 2013 19:48:15 -0800 (PST) From: M de Luis gimme_the_giffs@yahoo.com Subject: Boot with 1.44" Floppy, then net install from thumb drive? To: "users@lists.fedoraproject.org" users@lists.fedoraproject.org Send reply to: M de Luis gimme_the_giffs@yahoo.com, Community support for Fedora users users@lists.fedoraproject.org mailto:users-request@lists.fedoraproject.org?subject=unsubscribe mailto:users-request@lists.fedoraproject.org?subject=subscribe
My old NEC Versa P440 laptop computer has no working CD drive, and can't boot off a USB thumb drive. It does have a USB connected 1.44" floppy drive that came with a rescue disk, so I believe that it may be able to boot off that. Okay then, how do I make a 1.44" Linux boot disk (boot/ root pair?) with enough USB capability to let me mount a USB thumb drive, one loaded with a Net based Fedora installation iso? Bit confused about how I might invoke the USB stick's Network based installation then, should I actually manage to get a boot a basic system up from floppies? Please, just vague ideas are all that's really required. If there are any relevant links with which I could be very gratefully provisioned, then I'm sure to realize a solution, provided that one may be possible in this case. T. :-)
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On 1/2/13, M de Luis gimme_the_giffs@yahoo.com wrote:
When I copied the Net installation iso of Fedora to my USB flash drive using the Fedora LiveUSB creator, I noticed that the pre-existing FAT32 filesystem on the thumb drive had been unaltered, and that DOS readable files for the live image and Network installation had been added in 4-new directories. Presumably some sort of boot loader, that is able to read the FAT32 filesystem files, was added to the boot sector region of the flash drive. As soon as I am able to recreate this mystery boot loader's installation process for a FAT32 formatted IDE drive, then the problem is licked. It's no effort to boot the laptop from a Windows98 rescue disk using the floppy drive, create a temporarily bootable DOS partition for the Net installation files, and then given the bios' legacy USB support will allow, merely copy the appropriate installation directories and files from the thumb drive to the hard disk. Install the boot loader, and away you go.
Okay, so who can tell me which bootloader is written into a thumb drive's boot sector, when the Fedora LiveUSB Creator tool prepares a USB flash drive using one of the installation iso images?
The bootloader is called SYSLINUX: http://www.syslinux.org/ IThey include DOS binaries.
Unfortunately, the copy of DOS included on the Windows 98 boot disk does not have a USB mass storage driver (or any sort of USB driver for that matter), though you might have some luck with this stuff: http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm
That being said, the easiest solution IMHO is to plug its hard drive into a different machine and do the install there.
--T.C.
On 01/02/2013 08:49 AM, T.C. Hollingsworth wrote:
On 1/2/13, M de Luis gimme_the_giffs@yahoo.com wrote:
When I copied the Net installation iso of Fedora to my USB flash drive using the Fedora LiveUSB creator, I noticed that the pre-existing FAT32 filesystem on the thumb drive had been unaltered, and that DOS readable files for the live image and Network installation had been added in 4-new directories. Presumably some sort of boot loader, that is able to read the FAT32 filesystem files, was added to the boot sector region of the flash drive. As soon as I am able to recreate this mystery boot loader's installation process for a FAT32 formatted IDE drive, then the problem is licked. It's no effort to boot the laptop from a Windows98 rescue disk using the floppy drive, create a temporarily bootable DOS partition for the Net installation files, and then given the bios' legacy USB support will allow, merely copy the appropriate installation directories and files from the thumb drive to the hard disk. Install the boot loader, and away you go.
Okay, so who can tell me which bootloader is written into a thumb drive's boot sector, when the Fedora LiveUSB Creator tool prepares a USB flash drive using one of the installation iso images?
The bootloader is called SYSLINUX: http://www.syslinux.org/ IThey include DOS binaries.
Unfortunately, the copy of DOS included on the Windows 98 boot disk does not have a USB mass storage driver (or any sort of USB driver for that matter), though you might have some luck with this stuff: http://www.bootdisk.com/usb.htm
That being said, the easiest solution IMHO is to plug its hard drive into a different machine and do the install there.
--T.C.
That would probably *not* be a good idea, unless the other machine is identical. The install process customizes the system to fit the hardware it finds--video, sound, hard drive controller, Ethernet chip, etc. It's very likely that when you moved the drive back to your original machine, nothing would work.
--doug
Am 02.01.2013 19:08, schrieb Doug:
That being said, the easiest solution IMHO is to plug its hard drive into a different machine and do the install there.
--T.C.
That would probably *not* be a good idea, unless the other machine is identical. The install process customizes the system to fit the hardware it finds--video, sound, hard drive controller, Ethernet chip, etc. It's very likely that when you moved the drive back to your original machine, nothing would work
this is NOT windows!
as default dracut generates a gegenric initramfs as long you do not configure it with hostonly="yes"
* there is no hard-wired video configuration * there is no hard-waired sound configuration * there is no hard-wired hard-drive controller * there is ESPECIALLY no hard-wired ethernet
what do you imagine why a live-usb boots on nearly any hardware? there is no "live-harwdare-support", the main component of a live-media is the preconfigurd desktop etc.
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Doug -
M de Luis -
Reindl Harald -
T.C. Hollingsworth