[RULE] Need help installing Laptop -- floppy & CD-Rom mutually exclusive

[bugler at teuton.org]

Ladies and Gentlemen:

HELP!

I'm installing RULE using slinky v0.3.96 and FC2.  Here's my problem... which I 
mentioned before...  The laptop has a floppy drive and a cd-rom... but they use 
the same drive bay and they are *NOT* hot-swappable.  Beforehand, OpenBSD was 
installed on the computer... but I wanted to see where I could get by using 
RULE out-of-the-box.

Now I'm stuck:  in a catch-22.  In order to install the OS to the hard drive, I 
need to be able to access the CD-ROM.  In order to access the CD-ROM, I need 
the CD-ROM present at boot-time... but if the CD-ROM is in the bay... I can't 
boot to the floppy!

After failing to install RULE, and with a freshly repartitioned hard drive, I 
tried to use "Smart Boot" as you recommended.  It appeared to install OK, and 
the computer booted to the program.  However, when I selected to boot from the 
CD-ROM (with the slinky-*.iso CD-R), it said something like "Error OxAA".  
Wouldn't boot.

I tried partitioning my drive for:  hda1 (2MB), hda2 (2MB), hda3 (>400MB), hda4 
(about 33MB).  I tried to find a way to copy the floppy images to hda1 and 
hda2... but I can't find a way to do it without having an OS installed.  Also, 
the kernel loaded by RULE only seems to recognize ext* file systems.  I tried 
to put disk1 on a FAT floppy and do:

gunzip /mnt/floppy/disk1i~1.gz | dd of=/dev/hda1 bs=1440k

But that didn't work.  Complained about going beyond the file system... and I 
think it referred to the /mnt/floppy because it was a FAT file system.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Gabriel

Quoting James Miller <jamtat at mailsnare.net>:

> On Mon, 17 May 2004 danj at netsoc.ucd.ie wrote:
> 
> > I had problems with CD boot and overcame them using a boot manager that
> > allows you to boot CD's, it's called 'XOSL' and can be found at
> > http://xosl.sourceforge.net/
> > it contains, as a subset, the boot manager 'Smart Boot Manager' , which
> > allows it to boot CD's, the dowside however, if memory serves me correctly
> 
> Smart Boot Manager has its own homepage as well at
> http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/
> 
> James
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Original home page of the RULE project: www.rule-project.org
> Original Rule Development Site http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/rule/> 
Original RULE mailing list: Rule-list at nongnu.org, hosted at http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rule-list
> 
> 





_______________________________________________
Original home page of the RULE project: www.rule-project.org
Original Rule Development Site http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/rule/
Original RULE mailing list: Rule-list at nongnu.org, hosted at http://mail.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/rule-list