Task difficulty: hard
I have a 486 laptop with 16 MB of memory. It has no floppy, no CD-ROM, no USB (except through PCMCIA) and only a PCMCIA ethernet card that can’t be booted from. Right now, it has command.com and a few associated .sys files on its 400 MB hard drive.
I want to install Linux on it. Or full-fledged DOS. Or Win 3.1. Or Win NT 4.0. Or something appropriate to a 486, but I’m leaning towards Slackware.
So. Without a bootable drive other than the hard drive, how do I get Linux on it?
The idea came to mind to get a 2.5 inch hard drive adapter and just load the hard drive as a secondary drive in my main laptop or desktop, then install Linux to it from Windows (if such is possible) or at least get some kind of booting Linux root system there. The problem is, I’m not at all certain that I can install Linux like that, and I’m not keen on overwriting the MBR on my laptop or desktop if I screw something up.
If I had a null-modem cable (parallel), I could install drivers to the little beastie or get loadlin on there… or something. With loadlin, I think I could fudge this installation process.
Suggestions? Recommendations? I’m thinking my best bet is going to be to use or get the hard drive adapter, but can I really install Linux to the drive without screwing up what the host system is running?
4 Comments
WO
I think there’s a version of Knoppix now that you just have to wave over the computer to get it to run.
stobor
never tried it, but i think this is what damn small linux was designed for.
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
I know they support booting from usb thumb drives, so i imagine you could use your hard drive the same way (get that adapter, backup anything you care about, rewrite it. the MBR may be fine the way it is.)
I would guess the knoppix and ubuntu live cds out there are going to have a lot of crap you dont want on them, and be close to the max size of your hard drive.
wedge_deston
There was an install option for SuSE that you could use to install from Windows/DOS. It had a program to write the MBR correctly and would put the necessary files on the HD to run Linux.
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