Subj : Re: boot floppy to facilitate boot from IDE CDROM on classic Pentium
To   : comp.os.linux
From : Roby
Date : Thu Nov 25 2004 02:12 pm

Justin Jones wrote:

> Roby wrote:
>> Justin Jones wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>>boot floppy to facilitate boot from IDE CDROM on classic Pentium
>>>
>>>I have an old Dell laptop Pentium 150Mhz XPiCD without BIOS
>>>support for booting from CDROM, but there are several boot
>>>Utility Linux Boot CD's I would like to run on this box from
>>>time to time.  Is there a premade boot floppy to facilitate
>>>this or does that even make sense?  i.e., appartently there
>>>is more to it than boot=/dev/hdc at the lilo prompt and
>>>would such a boot floppy have to be custom made for each
>>>LiveCD Utility?
>> 
>> Ask your favorite search engine to find Smart Boot Manager, which will
>> make
>> you a floppy disk that will boot CDROMs on that machine.  I've used it on
>> a
>> vintage 1996 P166 machine.  Works well.
>> Roby
> 
> Thanks.  That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking
> for, but unfortunanately I was not successful [OxAA error]
> in booting my Dell Latitude laptop XPiCD classic Pentium
> 150mhz [flashed to A12 BIOS] using the Smart Boot Manager
> 3.7.1 boot floppy.
> v
> Its CD-ROM is a bit finnicky in which brands of CD-R's
> it will read but that was ruled out as the problem by
> trying a couple of factory burnt CD's.
> ---end---

I couldn't find my Smart Bootmanager floppy, so I downloaded sbminst.exe and
made a new v3.7.1 boot floppy under DOS.  I tried to boot several bootable
CDROMs (Knoppix, DSL, a couple of Linux installers, Acronis TrueImage,
etc).  

In each instance I got a 0xAA error when I highlighted CD-ROM and pressed
Enter.   A second Enter caused the message to disappear.  A third Enter
caused to machine to boot from the CD after a brief pause.  The same series
of events occur on my P166 dinosaur and my nearly new P4 box.

Maybe you weren't persistant enough!

Roby

.