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