[Linux4christians] old laptop

[Michael Hipp]

> From: "steven rowland" <spiff_s50 at hotmail.com>
> 
> my cousin bought an old dell latitude laptop. it has some strange hacked 
> version of dos (doesn't follow normal commands) on it. it came with the 
> floppy drive which it recognizes. they bought a refurbished cdrom drive for 
> it, which the bios does not recognize. it was designed for windows 95. i 
> want to install feather or puppy linux on it, but i can't boot from cdcan 
> any one think of a way that i can get the laptop to see the cdrom?could 
> installing a minimal command line linux by floppy help?thank you for your 
> helpsteven rowland

Lots of machines of this vintage didn't have the ability to boot from cd under any circumstances.

I've used a Win98se boot floppy before as a way to make sure the cd works and get access to it. Lots of distros used to have a batch file and dos executable that would then allow you to install the distro from within dos or even windows. I don't remember what the dos executable was called but it used to be a common feature of many distros. Last time I did this was on Red Hat Linux 9. Quite a long time ago, but surely the tools to do such are still around?

Anyone remember more specifically what I'm talking about?

Sorry I can't be more help,
Michael