Trying to install DSL or Puppy

[justbill]

A Friend of mine would like a small Linux on and old machine he has. It is a:
HP Pavilion 7125
133mz Pentium microprocessor
1.5 gig harddrive
48Mb ram
6x cd rom
I have burned botn DSL and Puppy on my machine, and they will both boot on mine. It is a:
HP Vectra
233 Pentium II
60 gig harddrive
192 Mb ram
I burned them using K3b, and as I said they will both boot on my machine, but they won't boot on the Pavilion. I have the boot order on the Pavilion set as
first boot CD ROM
second boot FLOPPY
third boot HARDDRIVE
and neither one (DSL or PUPPY) will boot. He currently has win98 on the Pavilion, and wants a Linux OS in its place. What am I doing wrong here? I believe I have the boot order correct, and I made sure to burn iso image, and as I said, they will boot on my machine. Is it possible that in the burn process, I burned between 11.5x and 12.5x speed, and his burnner is a 6x, could that be the problem? Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

Justbill

[XiaoKJ]

I think you will want to make a cdrom-booting floppy to do it as the pavilion may be too old to support booting off cds

[justbill]

do I go about doing that? I would be making a floppy in win98, on my machine. I have win98 on my first partition (which I rarely use), and FC3 on my second partition, however FC3 does not see my floppy drive, so I have to do it win98

Thanks
Justbill

[XiaoKJ]

just make a boot disk from win98. it should be able IIRC.

[justbill]

I've got my boot disk, I highlight start computer with cd rom support, and then it does it pci bus scan and a few other things, and then wants a command prompt.
A:\
What would be the correct prompt?
cd rom is drive F:

Thanks
Justbill

[justbill]

I only added this post to try to get this thread back towards the top! Can anyone give me some instructions on this problem (getting DSL or Puppy on this old box). It currently has win98 on it, won't boot from cdrom (BIOS are set to boot cdrom first), and the disks boot fine on my machine. It was suggested earlier to install with a win98 boot disk, but I'm not sure exactly how to do that.

Thanks
Justbill

[psych-major]

Originally posted by justbill
I've got my boot disk, I highlight start computer with cd rom support, and then it does it pci bus scan and a few other things, and then wants a command prompt.
A:\
What would be the correct prompt?
cd rom is drive F:

Thanks
Justbill

What you have is a Windows boot floppy. There is a way to make a DSL boot floppy with your win98 box:
You need Rawrite2.exe from here (http://www.tux.org/pub/dos/rawrite/) and
a DSL boot image from here (ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/boot-0.8.0.img)

Good luck!

[XiaoKJ]

no. its not booting the system with cd-rom support. its booting the whole system from the cd. is this supported on the boot disk?

if not, go with psych-major

[justbill]

And when I start the machine with the floppy in, I get an intro screen for DSL, with options: to continue press "enter" or for more boot options press F2. I have tried both, and it continually says it can't find the knoppix file. A working, bootable disk is in the cdrom, its like it won't look there. It does take me to a "limited shell", where I can enter a command line, but I am not sure at this point what to do. In win98 the cdrom is drive F:, it see's two harddrives, but as far as I can tell, there is only one there.

Any suggestions?
Thanks
Justbill

[psych-major]

A machine of this age should be able to boot from CD. Maybe for a reality check, try a different live CD. Here are a couple that are small but have neat features:

Mutagenix (http://mutagenix.org/2.4.26-2/index.php) (Slackware based. The console only version is only 127megs, good for a quick sanity check or to move files to a USB drive from a Win9x machine)
Slax (http://slax.linux-live.org/download.php) (Slackware based. The popcorn edition has Firefox, Thunderbird, xmms and mplayer pre-installed. It also uses xfce for the desktop, will work better with his limited RAM)
Mepis (http://www.mepis.org/book/view/1462?PHPSESSID=16dfbb8a1a9d0639a5abf43cb404bdeb) (Not as small as the others, but full-featured and fun to play with)
Ubuntu (http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/) (If all else fails with trying to burn an iso, they will ship CD's to you for free!)

Also, I re-read your first post. I would make the boot order:
Floppy
CD-ROM
Hard drive
Watch closely when you boot, some PC's want you to "Hit any key to boot from CD" and if you miss it, they continue on and boot from the hard drive.

Finally, I don't know what his money situation is, but you can pick up a Compaq PII 350 here (http://www.pcliquidator.com/displayProduct.asp?which=40) for $40.00. That would be peppy enough to be a main system, with some memory added. 128 megs memory is available for $25 at the same site, here (http://www.pcliquidator.com/displayProduct.asp?which=54). Also make sure the one you order has a hard drive, or plan on migrating his existing one!

Hope some of this helps!

[nordinaryspider]

This should do the trick:

http://bootcd.narod.ru/bcdl150z.zip

You'll need to use rawrite32 to get it on your floppy. Put both the CD and the floppy in, reboot, and it should work just fine.

I'd recommend that you let your friend check out both distros as live CDs for awhile before deciding which one to install to hard drive, because they are so very different! Puppy is extremely newbie friendly and DSL is delightfully geeky.

[justbill]

Posted back a while ago. Puppy has been successfully installed on his harddrive! I ended up taking the HD out of his machine, puting it in my machine, and installing from there. My friend really does like Puppy so far, because it so closely resembles Microsoft Windows 9x. The only thing negative I can say about it is, I don't care for the need to have a boot floppy on a harddrive install, they don't seem to have a bootloader designed into the os, and I don't know how to put one in. I would like to set it up with a grub bootloader, but so far, have not had any luck finding any information that I can understand ( i am a newbie myself, and don't speak fluent geek yet :-). I am currentl using FC3 as my OS which has grub, and I read somewhere that lilo is a little "quirky" with puppy. Other than that, he is happy with his os.

Justbill