[RULE] Booting a 486 with no BIOS CDROM support

[Daniel O'Neill]

I encountered problems booting my machine and after lots of failures, I
have, with lot's of great help from other RULERs, not least of whom was
David C Rigby, finially suceeded. The solution I used follows:

Smartboot manager failed to boot from floppy, and it's website says it's
built for 386 machines. However a related appliction xosl
(http://www.xosl.org/) installed using MS DOS on the same partition as MS
DOS was sucessfull. XOSL contains Smartboot manager, and has no problem
loading it on the 486, and subsequentially allows CD ROM booting. XOSL was
also usefull in booting floppies that my 486 wouldn't boot on it's own.
XOSL comes with options to install in it's own partition, I chose not to
do this as I have found it sometimes confuses partition managers (Part and
PQ Magic etc.) I'm not sure whether it can be installed using a
preinstalled Tiny Linux but I think it can. Even if it can't a small DOS
installation is nothing to worry about and it can be deleted afterward.
XOSL have lots of good documentation on their website for refrence.

I have yet to complete a sucesfull install of Red Hat but I do not suspect
XOSL to be the root of those problems.

toodles!
Dan


Daniel O'Neill

'You can put a cat in an oven but that doesn't make it a biscuit'