installing ubuntu without bootable CD rom drive

Rich Duzenbury rduz-ubuntu at theduz.com
Thu May 26 04:01:42 UTC 2005


On Wed, 2005-05-25 at 23:29 +0200, Thomas Kaiser wrote:
> > I fiddled and fussed and never was able to get this to run.  Always got
> > a kernel panic after a couple of seconds.  Turns out that both knoppix
> > and ubuntu recognize the cd-rom drive just fine, once card services are
> > loaded.
> > 
> > I did use loadlin, but I used it to fire up the network install.  Much
> > slower and more painful, but I at least got ubuntu loaded.
> 
> So, you got an hint to boot something from DOS to install your Ubuntu. 
Yes, good hint.  I really hate the network install though, it is so
slow, and I ended up having to run it twice.  I've got the hoary CD --
there should be *some way* to get it to access the setup routine,
without necessarily booting it.  Windows can do this, btw.  Boot a dos
disk (with cd-rom drivers and MSCDEX.exe), change to D: run setup.exe.
Would have saved me a wicked bunch of time to have a setup.bat somewhere
on the cd that called loadlin (correctly -- if thats possible!).  Hmm...

> And if you stay on Ubuntu (or any other Linux), the job is done.

Yes, one would hope.  Not for me in this case, however.  This laptop
also originally ran win98 first edition on a 4Gb drive.  I needed to
keep the contents bootable.  I also need to run an app that requires
win98SE.  So a bunch of grub foolery, and a number of different boot
disks later, I have a machine that boots hoary, win98, and win98SE.

I think it took about three tries to get everything loaded correctly.  I
learned the hard way that the laptop BIOS in this machine can only
recognize the first 8GB of the 40GB disk that I put in.  Linux can
access the whole drive, but the win98 and win98SE partitions must be
_entirely_ contained in that first 8GB, and also the /boot partition.
My original plan was to have a 4GB win98 and a 6GB win98SE, but alas
that can't work.  Took a lot of time to figure that one out.

Also, the old win98 partition that I pulled from the other drive would
not boot, it would just hang after about twenty seconds, but safe mode
would work.  Turns out that I had to remove the toshiba specific IDE
driver from the profile, and then upon reboot, the machine recognized
the "new" ide device and installed a proper (generic) driver.

The other thing I would say (and I'm no MS fanboy) is that this laptop
runs win98 and win98SE pretty well.  Everything is pretty snappy.
Ubuntu barely runs.  It's pretty sluggish to get up and booted, and
though the wdm/icewm starts pretty quickly after the login, it takes a
number of seconds just to fire up an xterm.  I've got five workstations
running ubuntu, though and I'm extremely pleased with it.


> 
> SBM is some sort of a BIOS, so that's way it could not see your CDROM. 
> The BIOS or BIOS like software does not initialize PCMCIA device 
> usually, as far as I know.
I think you must be right.  The problem is that I've seen this advice
given to lots of folks, and I think for the case of a PCMCIA CD-ROM
drive, it is a blind alley.


Thomas, thanks for getting me going in the right direction.

> 
> Regards, Thomas

Regards,
Rich

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