[beginnertech]

I just wondering if anyone has a good suggestion for a distro that will configure a PCMCIA CD-ROM and boot off it. One that has a PCMCIA floppy .img file that I can write. Something other than Mandrake ! Net boot won't work either unless I can do it over a UTP crossover cable and my desktop. I can boot from floppy and have installed Red Hat over my old schools network that had netboot setup. Its not possible to boot from the PCMCIA CD-ROM. I'm sure about it. Any ideas?

[saikee]

From my experience selecting which device to boot is a matter for the BIOS and totally outside the scope of a Linux distro.

An external CD rom linked to a PCMCIA card should be no different from one connected to a USB port, unless your PCMCIA connection connects to only the one device and nothing else.

The booting sequence and choices are provided by the laptop manufacturers. One can only get an updated BIOS if it supports an external CD boot.

[beginnertech]

See I can get olde Red Hat 9 and Mandrake to work with it. Red Hat 9 has a regular boot disk (bootdisk.img) and a "pcmadd.img" boot disk to add after booting with the first bootdisk. Mandrake has the same thing. I want to put Fedora on it but they stopped bootdisk support after FC1. So I'm looking for something newer. Unless I can figure out how to do a hard disk install for whatever I want. Like I said, it won't directly boot from PCMCIA. From what I can tell, it was set up to do netboot for OS installs.

[lynch]

Guess what? The only pcmcia floppy boot image I could find was from Mandriva:
ftp://ftp.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/ma...ges/pcmcia.img
It's worth trying to see if it sees your CDrom and then try booting from the install CD of another distro.
It might work.
lynch

[saikee]

Whenever I have an installed Linux that fails to boot I will boot to anther Linux, say using a Live CD.

I then mount the partition of the failed Linux, change root to it and replicate its boot loader again.

Typical commands for change root to a failed Linux in hdg9 are

mkdir /mnt/hdg9
mount /dev/hdg9 /mnt/hdg9
chroot /mnt/hdg9 --- thereafter I would be working with the Linux that failed to boot

If the bootloader is Lilo

lilo -b /dev/hda - will restore its boot loader in MBR
lilo -b /dev/hda10 - will restore its boot loader in its root partition (assumed to be hda10)
lilo -b /dev/fd0 - will replicate the boot loader in a floppy

The equivalent for Grub are

grub-install /dev/hda
grub-install /dev/hda10
grub-install /dev/fd0

Never had a need to get bootable image file from the distro.

I think it is much more reliable to change root to an unbootable Linux and rescue it from its inside. It is easiest way when we have Live CDs.