I solved this problem by booting of CD. All you need is an old atapi-cdrom and a MS-DOS boot-disk, which loads the driver. If you have a distribution which has an loadlin environment on the cd ( debian and SuSE are the two I found working yet ) you can go to the install directory and boot it. On debian it is:
>c: >cd install >boot ( I hope this is correct ) Then you can do a normal Installation of Linux without a DOS-Partition , but be careful of Diskspace. If you have installed a proper LILO and need still more diskspace you can replace the atapi-cdrom with a slave disk and get your packages over network. Or you do an basic Installation in another machine and simply plug in the harddisk. ( Which you better don't try with windoze :) If you want to boot from floppy try the OpenBSD Installation Disks, they work... ( http://www.openbsd.org ). With an Opne BSD installation you can do some nice things on this slow machine. But linux is much more comfortable. I tried for over one year now on this box. I had at least 20 installations of different OS's and tried several network cards and scsi adapters. But now I decided to use this machine only for decoration purposes, because you should be able to grab a pci-system, say 120mhz pentium for lau nowadays. Which runs really better.. Good Luck ! And be patient during kernel-compilation :) Fitsch P.S.: If you get a method working to boot debian with floppy, I would be pleased to hear from you, to reactivate this well-designed little box.
