Topic: Help! BIOS doesn't support boot from CD

[Don Ferris]

I downloaded the ISO image and burned it to CD, but the machine I'm installing on does not support booting from CD. I tried flashing the BIOS with a newer version, but it won't go. (It's an old Dell notebook, and the battery is required in order to flash the BIOS... battery is in but it's dead.)

I looked for some kind of install/setup, but none is obvious to me.  Since I'm primarily a DOS/Windows guy, I hoped I could track it down via autoexec.bat, but no such luck. Can anyone help me out with a step-by-step procedure for booting from a DOS floppy, then installing from CD?

[Don Ferris]

OK- so I found boot.img and used rawrite to create a boot floppy, but when I boot from this floppy, it doesn't see the CD drive...?

[Johan]

Hello Don,

On de Cd you have burn are a few directories

Two off them are needed to make a bootble foot disk

This is the way

put your CD in a workstation whith floppy drive

go to the directorie off dosutils

start the programm rawrite.exe

It's opens a dosbox and ask for a sourcefile

(cd-name):\images\boot.img

then it's ask in witch drive you put a empty 3.5" formated diskette

you fill in a:

3-5 minutes later you got your bootdisk

put in you your laptop en reset it

Then follow all instructions on the screen.

Beter is to read the admin guide on the CD in the subdirection documentation.

Good luck

Johan

[Don Ferris]

Thanks for the help, Johan!

I did try that, and when it boots from the floppy, it doesn't see the cd-rom drive. I tried creating a floppy from "oldcdrom.img" but I have no idea what to do with it - I expected to find a readme on it, but I can't read it on my Windows machine.

What file(s) do I modify on the boot floppy in order to load the CD-ROM drivers? What changes do I need to make? (I assume there are probably also some additional driver files to be copied over?)

[Don Ferris]

Well, I figured it out, so I thought I'd post the workaround in case anyone needs it in the future...

In SYSLINUX.CFG there's a line that says:

  append initrd=initrd.img lang= ks=cdrom:/images/ks_stub.cfg class=kickstart

Well, there's no /images directory on the boot floppy, so I created one and copied ks_stub.cfg over (from the /images directory of the CD.)

Worked like a dream.