on 8-6-2008 11:34 AM William L. Maltby spake the following:
On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 20:03 +0200, Michel van Deventer wrote:
Hi,
On Wed, 2008-08-06 at 11:36 -0500, Bob Smither wrote:
Dear List,
I have an older Sony Vaio that I would like to install CentOS on. The unit has a USB CD that can _not_ be used as a boot device (the Sony one could, but mine is an aftermarket CD and can't be used to boot). It does have a floppy drive that it can boot from.
I think someone mentioned a floppy. Last I checked, the ISO image had some sub-directories that contained floppy images. If they're still included, you should be able to make a bootable floppy and then use the USB CD as the install media. Or get the image from a network location (IIRC).
The only network install method for CentOS that I can find uses a CD, not a floppy.
Give the floppy method a try. If it let's you get either the CD or to a network, you should be able to install.
Is there anyway to get CentOS on this machine?
Can you boot from USB stick? You then could use the Live CD, converted to USB or use another bootable linux on it. As long as you have a bootable partition where you can put a vmlinuz, initrd.img and grub, you're in business.
regards,
Michel
<snip sig stuff>
HTH
Floppy is probably out per this info in the /images directory;
This directory contains image files that can be used to create media capable of starting the CentOS installation process.
The boot.iso file is an ISO 9660 image of a bootable CD-ROM. It is useful in cases where the CD-ROM installation method is not desired, but the CD-ROM's boot speed would be an advantage.
To use this image file, burn the file onto CD-R (or CD-RW) media as you normally would.
The diskboot.img file is a VFAT filesystem image that can be written to a USB pendrive or other bootable media larger than a floppy. Note that booting via USB is dependent on your BIOS supporting this. It should be written to the device using dd.
But if you can boot from USB you are all set. If you can only boot from floppy, you would need to use a bootable floppy linux that supports your network card to copy some stuff to the system and get it to boot the pxe images by whatever you can use like grub, or syslinux.
Or you can remove the hard drive and copy files to it from another system or install from that system.