installing on an old laptop w/o bootable cdrom

Holly · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2003 Posts: 67

i have an old toshiba satellite 410 cdt (P90, 16 MB RAM, 800MB HD) and would like to install gentoo on it.

the biggest problem is, that its not possible to boot from cd. is there any (set of) floppy disk(s), that contains everything i need for installing gentoo? or can i boot with a simple floppy and chroot to the cd or something?

another problem might be, that the laptop only hast 16 mb ram. iirc the install-cd needs more ram for the ramdisk. but as i can't boot from cds i think this doesn't matter.

plate · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 9:19 pm Post subject:

The adventurous type, aren't you.

I'm afraid there's just no way you'll get Gentoo to install in a way that looks even similar to the methods you can find in the installation guide. It's not impossible, of course, but to keep things simple, I'd suggest that you rip out the harddisk from that machine, put it in an adapter sled, connect it to a slightly more modern desktop PC with proper RAM and CPU speed, and do the installation in there before you make the disk bootable and shove it back into your laptop.

psyqil · Advocate Joined: 26 May 2003 Posts: 2767

Have a look at http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/altinstall.xml for some ideas, perhaps you can start a lightweight live-cd, bootable business card or that 'under 50Mb' thingy come to mind...P90 was around '96, IIRC, there has to be some diskbased distro available to get the tarball to your lappy :wink:

think4urs11 · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 9:23 pm Post subject:

Hi!

For the floppy boot part maybe this helps
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=737841&highlight=#737841

But having only 16MB Ram is ...well... not really much, you know :-)

HTH
T.
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mad man moon · Posted: Tue Jan 06, 2004 9:25 pm Post subject:

There are several threads about start an installation from floppys, f.i try this one: https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=63862 or search for "bootdisk" or "boot floppy how".
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Holly · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2003 Posts: 67

thanks for your replies. i'll try to boot from the basic live-cd with smart boot manager first, but i think that might fail because of the 16 mb ram. otherwise i will plug the harddisk to another pc.

Holly · n00b Joined: 08 Mar 2003 Posts: 67

great, seems to work. i had several kernel panics until i switched off every option that the kernel allows to (nousb and so on...) and am currently extracting the stage1 tarball. :twisted:

i hope bootstrap works with 16 mb, as i have not much space for swap, too. do you think 16 mb ram + 64 mb swap are enough?

psyqil · Advocate Joined: 26 May 2003 Posts: 2767

Otherwise you can still do a stage3 + GRP install, or compile packages on another machine...