[ILUG] Installing Debian using Floppies

[Proinnsias Breathnach]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2004 at 01:05:10PM -0700, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Chris Higgins (chris.higgins at darach.ie):
> 
> > [0] how you do that if you don't have network or cdrom access is the
> > challenging bit
> 
> On some antique laptops, the least-bother way around that problem is to
> extract the HD, temporarily connect it to a desktop box, perform
> installation, and move the HD back.  (You'll often need to re-do the
> bootloader.)
> 
> 
Actually - I've found on the few occasions I've had to do that - that
the easiest way was to do a "hard-disk" install ... 

On the assumption you've maybe 250MB of hard-drive which would have been
fairly typical for the vintage : 

Boot from a toms rt/bt disk: partition and format 5mb ext2 (for /boot) 
30mb or so as fat (eventually swap) and the rest as ext[23] for /

Using a parallel zip drive (usually unsupported during initial install)
from a freedos disk with guest.exe (the ZipDrive software) move the base 
install stuff to the 30mb partition from the CD .. include the loadlin
scripts .. and boot the install from the 30mb partition.

Once you've completed the base install - you'll need to change the
partition type back to LinuxSwap and mkswap it ... but otherwise you'll
be sorted.

(also works for booting the install straight from a zip-disk ... but
that can be a) dog-slow and b) generally unsupported these days !)

P