OS boot from floppy

Hey, I have fianally had the time to try to install SuSE again. So I choose to put everything on the external HD, not changing the MBR of my main drive. After the first CD was installed (of 5), It restarted the computer, which loaded into windows :mad: . Now I have no way to continue the installation because when I try 'boot from removable device' it still detects the main drive first. Now to the question. Is there any way to write some sort of script on a floppy to boot to the external HD, because I don't want to change the main MBR. Last time I tried that I had to reformat the drive. I'm not sure if the installation is finished because it said sonething like the base installation is complete, but there are still 4 more CDs to install, so i don't know if thats just software or what. Any help would be appreciated.

have you tried just putting in the 1st cd again. and see if it will let you continue with the install

what version of Suse.?

Good Day,

If you don't want to change the MBR, during the SuSE install you can most likely select a "boot from floppy option". However first I'd check your BIOs and change the boot sequence to see if the External Hdd can go first. Although the MBR on your first drive doesn't see the SuSE, the boot loader (Grub) on the other HDD most likely does and may give you an option to select which OS you want to boot.

cheers

Hi

If the other OS in your primary HDD is windows XP then there will be no need to reformat the HDD because the recovery option in the XP CD gives you the option of running fixboot and fixmbr to fix and restore the active windows installation.

Even Suse 10.0 CD gives an option of reinstalling the GRUB loader to again detect and add any active OS installations.

This way there is no possible way of screwing things up. However if you still want to continue without disturbing the existing MBR just select the boot from floppy option during the installtion of suse as mentioned by Relyt.

As you have installed one CD of Suse the partition will now be in ext2 or ext3 (depending on what you chose) which is not detected by windows. Using tool like Partition Magic you can reformat it and add it to the free space for windows. As acidtone pointed out see what happens when you pop in the first cd again.

As an advice install the minimum GUI when you are installing suse. That way if you still screw up you'll take less time to know. A 5 CD full install of suse takes a lot of time and if things still go bad the time and effort goes down the drain. The packages can be updated in Suse as and when required later on.

I'm installing SuSE 9, because I downloaded and burned it like a week before the new one came out, and i don't feel like downloading it all over. Anyway, is it possible to choose boot from Floppy if I have already installed the 1st CD? (I chose safe install, 3rd option down because the normal install wouldn't load)

I am going to put in the CD again and see what happens...

Ok, I got everything working, SuSE running and all. What happened was I loaded the CD, then I went back to safe install, which was actually the 5th item, and since it was at the beginning of the install, I chose abort. Then I got this error, which then sent me to this new menu I've never seen before. In this menu I chose something like Boot installation from drive. Then I chose sda6 which is where i installed the first CD. It loaded a few seconds, then I finished the installation! Now I still need to be able to load SuSE from a floppy, but now I don't know how. I hope I don't have to reinstall to be able to configure it that way..

Ive looked around in SuSE and found no option to make a floppy to boot from. (I'm still just getting used to it though) The only way I can get it to boot is to put in the SuSE CD and choose boot from sda. Is it possible to write your own script that just runs the boot file on the HD? Or doesn't it work that way?

Good Evening,

Ever since about version 8.0, a floppy disk does not have sufficient space for all the start-up files. You can create a "Boot CD" if you desire. Just enter "Creating Boot CD" into the KDE Help Center Menu and follow the instruction. Pretty easy, however I'd be more apt to let "Grub" write to the MBR of the first disk. It is reverseable if something goes amiss.

cheers

Thanks very much Relyt, im going to try that.

I went into YaST control center, and went to the system tab, which gave me the option of making 8 boot floppies, but no CD choice (I didn't know there was a second pannel for admin earlier:rolleyes: ). I really don't want to do this..is there any other optIon?

Quote:

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Originally posted here by metguru
I went into YaST control center, and went to the system tab, which gave me the option of making 8 boot floppies, but no CD choice (I didn't know there was a second pannel for admin earlier:rolleyes: ). I really don't want to do this..is there any other optIon?

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Yes.... you can use the first CD or the DVD and use it as something to Boot from....

As for the other question, CD one and two are the main ones and the other are mostly just software. If you want to yuo can open them up in Explorer on Windows or another File Manager on Linux and see what is actually there.

But anyway if you don't want Floppys because you'd need more than one as pointed out already, just use the first CD, they have a recovery console and some other things you can use.

Oh by the way, installing on External, the MBR is located on the first HD in your computer, so if you install somethign on removable and expect the MBR not to do some sort of complaining, well it's sort of asking for it.

How big is your HD? The one inside the machine that is? If you're only using it for testing or something you could just make a little 5 or 10 GB partition for SUSE and that way you don't have this huge hassle, and then use the External HD to store all your music and whatever else you have that would take up space and isn't really needed on the HD itself.

I do it with my laptop. The HD is small and so I have a 5 GB Windows XP partition, and then a 25 GB Slackware partition, and when I run out of space, I move it to the External USB HD I have and just use that for when I want to listen to music or watch a ... Full legal movie...

And I store the personal stuff on there so I have it on hand an don't need to put it all on that HD.

Or, you could possibly do like I did with this machine, I added an extra HD into it so I have one for Windows XP and another for SUSE 10.1. HDs are so cheap these days it's an actual option for people more so than a few years ago.

Thanks, Ill need to think about that, but untill then, there has to be a faster way than the way I was doing it. I would start the setup, which took like 5 minutes to load, then I had to quit, which would take me to that boot menu that would let me boot to the external HD.

5 minutes???? I installed it on a 433 MHz Celeron with 192 RAM and an 8 MB video card and it took MAYBE a minute and a half... Are you sure there isn't something else going on hardware related?

I don't know; I stick in the CD, the menu comes up in like 15 seconds, then I click safe setup, because for some reason the others don't even load, and it takes like 5 minutes, mabie even more, it says 'initialising' the whole time, then the setup starts asking me the questions.

Wow... You have another machine you can test it on? There seems to be something going on there but I'm not sure what as I've never installed in external HDs before...

No ,the only other machine I have is a Pentium 233Mhz with no USB and a CD drive that doesn't even open.

Here's something you might want to try: http://www.antionline.com/showthread...linux+cgkanchi

Cheers,
cgkanchi

Yes, i know that you can use the boot floppies, but SuSE requires 8 floppies.