Boot with 1.44" Floppy, then net install from thumb drive?

Wed Jan 2 13:32:30 UTC 2013

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 at kuentos.guam.net>
To: M de Luis <gimme_the_giffs at 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 at yahoo.com>
Subject:    Boot with 1.44" Floppy, then net install from thumb drive?
To:    "users at lists.fedoraproject.org" <users at lists.fedoraproject.org>
Send reply to:    M de Luis <gimme_the_giffs at yahoo.com>,
    Community support for Fedora users <users at lists.fedoraproject.org>
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> 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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