On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 09:30:01PM -0400, Matt Gerginski wrote: | Hi. I want to put debian on a 486 that I recently got from my school. | They were giving away "obsolete" computers, so I grabbed 5 of them. I | just have one small problem: I can't get any of the rescue.bin disks to | boot on the computer. It boots fine in my newer computer, so its not | the disk. To get around that, I used an old slackware bootdisk, and | then loaded the debian root installation disk. It worked great for | everything except for the network configuration and some kernel | modules. I tried to do the neccasary repairs myself, but it seems the | only way to get this thing working right is to use the debian boot | disk. I need to find a boot disk that works, compile a kernel of my own | for the boot disk, or find an older debian boot disk and hope it works | with the machine and still works with the debian installation process. | Any suggestions or help??? Thanks a ton.
I did an installed Debian on a 486SX-25 with 8 MB RAM. I only had the CDs, no floppies and the system couldn't boot from the CD. Also, DOS didn't have any CD drivers so I couldn't use loadlin (though I guess I could have copied loadlin and the kernel to the HD as someone else suggested). My solution was to pull the HD out and put it in the newer workstation I have and install from CD there. Once done I put the HD back in the 486 and it has worked great since then. (BTW the CD drive was borrowed from another machine just for the install on that box) -D
