In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Leonid Grinberg wrote: > The machine has both a floppy drive and a CD drive, but the BIOS does > not recognize the CD drive as a drive, and does not allow me to boot > off of it, let alone USB. That leaves only floppies. > the machine is unable to > recognize the ethernet card, and I can't get much further than that > > The machine already runs some old distro of Linux, > Any ideas?
Save yourself a big hassle. Move the hard drive to a newer machine and do the base install there. Then edit etc/fstab as needed and move it back. Make a "raw" GRUB floppy with the new machine. Use it to boot the old one the first time, then install syslinux or grub or lilo or whatever in place. That should get you around any broken BIOS. I do laptop installs that way. That's *much* easier than fiddling around with Debian install floppies and non-booting CDs and unsupported Ethernet cards. If the newer machine has a Debian system on it already, and it fits on the old drive, you don't even need to go through the base install. Just make a file system on the old drive. You can cp -a a Debian system from one drive to another. (Remember not to copy /proc/ and /tmp/, and clean out /var/cache/apt/archives first.) Then edit etc/fstab, boot the copy with your raw GRUB floppy, and uninstall everything you don't need. While you're at it, the newer machine is faster, so make a kernel for the old machine there. Cameron -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
