[Nottingham] Gentoo on Very Old PC!?

[Martin]

Derek Huskisson wrote:
> On Saturday 09 September 2006 23:21, Martin wrote:
>> Folks,
>>
>> I'm about to experiment with Gentoo...
>>
>> The first problem is that the target machine cannot boot off the HDDs in
>> there (yes, it's my old LAN-party server, with the cd custom isolinux
>> bootup).
>>
>> Does the Gentoo installer from the LiveCD offer to make a boot disk?
>> (And also have the image fit into the 1.44MB of a floppy disk?)
>>
> 
> 	Pretty sure it doesn't, but have a look here:--
> 
> 
> 	http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-63862-highlight-live+floppy.html

Thanks for that, interesting... Looks like it's smartboot or back I go
to hack isolinux.

From
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?style=printable&full=1#book_part1_chap2
there is also the boot option:

"hdx=stroke    allows you to partition the whole harddrive even when
your BIOS can't handle large harddrives"

That last one requires that the HDDs have a jumper setting to fake a
smaller geometry/size.


Looks like I've a few things to try there later.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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