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There are times when DOS does come in handy. You might want to check out OpenDOS, for those occasions. Also those utilities simply modified the floppy, to direct booting to another drive. It doesn't actually require DOS, if you can figure out some other method of creating the floppy. However, it's been years since I've looked at that sort of thing. I also seem to recall a Linux method, but I'm not sure on that. A 10 Mb ethernet should be OK for an install. It'd still be faster than an install over the internet, for most internet connections. After all, how often do you plan on installing. A few years ago, I had to do a "network install" of OS/2, using a Lap Link parallel port cable. While it took quite a while, it did work. Linda A. W. wrote:
James Knott wrote:
I seem to recall some old DOS utilities, that would direct booting to the CD. One of those might do the trick. Another possibility, would be a network install. You'd mount the CD on another system and share it via NFS or Samba and then with the boot floppy from SuSE, install over a network.
=== The system no longer has a working DOS partition on it. I was just hoping to get by (for laziness's sake) w/o burning flopppies. Your idea of using NFS or SMB is probably the best way even though it only has a builtin 10Mb ethernet (I probably could use a pcmcia add-in card to get around that for purposes of the install...in fact...might not be a bad idea to just buy an extra 100Mb card since the card I could use for it is a 3com575 based card and I don't know if it is supported in 9.1. I know support for it was broken in 9.0 -- the driver and card utils had a driver version mismatch on the install CD. :-(
pcmcia cards are still pretty expensive for ethernet...unlike for desktop systems where you can find them for under $10 at places like Fry's. Haven't seen any gigabyte PCMCIA cards. I'm not sure -- but it might be the pcmcia bus specification. I'm not sure if it can handle a gigabit xfer speed...isn't the pcmcia bus still 33MHz * 32 bits? That'd be pushin' it for a gigabit card w/o some moderate buffering -- and that'd still be using 100% of the bus's BW.
Have only seen 1 laptop w/gigabit ethernet (a dell) so far and that was built-in.
Thanks for the idea on the network install. I'm sure it would be faster than the builtin CD even if the CD is 4-8x just because of the seek latency...
-linda