pytheas22
August 16th, 2008, 08:06 PM
This question pertains to Damn Small Linux, not Ubuntu, but I thought it would be best to post it here because there's no DSL section in the "Other OS Discussion" category.
I have a really old machine (Pentium I/32 MB) on which I want to put DSL. Unfortunately it has no working floppy, CD or USB device, and because it's an old laptop, I have no way of moving its hard drive to another computer.
The machine does have a working FAT32 hard disk with Windows 95 installed, and a working ethernet interface (I can't boot to network, however). So I downloaded the DSL .iso and extracted it on the Windows system.
I'm thinking that I can make the system boot to DSL along the same lines as wubi. I know that wubi creates a disk image at c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk and installs Ubuntu inside it. But I don't know enough about how wubi works or the Windows 95 bootloader (which apparently is quite different than the NT bootloader) to know 1) how to make the disk image; 2) how to put the DSL files inside the disk image properly; or 3) how to edit the Windows bootloader so that it will boot to DSL.
I'd be grateful for suggestions on how to accomplish the above three steps, or for other approaches I might take to solve the problem--I've thought about trying to install grub on the system or shrinking the Windows partition to give DSL its own partition (which I guess would also require grub to boot), but I'm not sure it's possible to do those things without a live CD. I did manage to install UNetbootin, which allows me to boot (via the Windows bootloader) to the equivalent of Super Grub Boot Disk, but I so far haven't been able to find a way to do anything useful with it.
I have a really old machine (Pentium I/32 MB) on which I want to put DSL. Unfortunately it has no working floppy, CD or USB device, and because it's an old laptop, I have no way of moving its hard drive to another computer.
The machine does have a working FAT32 hard disk with Windows 95 installed, and a working ethernet interface (I can't boot to network, however). So I downloaded the DSL .iso and extracted it on the Windows system.
I'm thinking that I can make the system boot to DSL along the same lines as wubi. I know that wubi creates a disk image at c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk and installs Ubuntu inside it. But I don't know enough about how wubi works or the Windows 95 bootloader (which apparently is quite different than the NT bootloader) to know 1) how to make the disk image; 2) how to put the DSL files inside the disk image properly; or 3) how to edit the Windows bootloader so that it will boot to DSL.
I'd be grateful for suggestions on how to accomplish the above three steps, or for other approaches I might take to solve the problem--I've thought about trying to install grub on the system or shrinking the Windows partition to give DSL its own partition (which I guess would also require grub to boot), but I'm not sure it's possible to do those things without a live CD. I did manage to install UNetbootin, which allows me to boot (via the Windows bootloader) to the equivalent of Super Grub Boot Disk, but I so far haven't been able to find a way to do anything useful with it.