M de Luis writes:
My old NEC Versa P440 laptop computer has no working CD drive, and
can't boot
off a USB thumb drive. It does have a USB connected 1.44" floppy drive that
came with a rescue disk, so I believe that it may be able to boot off that.
Okay then, how do I make a 1.44" Linux boot disk (boot/ root pair?) with
enough USB capability to let me mount a USB thumb drive, one loaded with a
Net based Fedora installation iso? Bit confused about how I might invoke the
USB stick's Network based installation then, should I actually manage to
get a boot a basic system up from floppies?
Please, just vague ideas are all that's really required. If there are
any relevant links with which I could be very gratefully provisioned, then
I'm sure to realize a solution, provided that one may be possible in this
case.
Unless my brain cells are giving out, old 3.5" floppies hold only 1.44mb of
data.
Given that a modern kernel is already four times that big, I just can't see
any way of bootstrapping off that. I don't think that even grub can fit onto
a floppy (let's revisit the entire escapade of grub blowing up when the
first partition starts at sector 63).
There might be ancient Linux distros, based around circa 2.0-version kernels
floating out there, that might have a boot/root install path. But kernels of
that vintage are not likely to have much, if any USB support.
You'll just have to get that CD drive fixed.