Nico wrote:

> On 19 Jun, 06:26, two_whee...@hotmail.com wrote:

>> I recently acquired a Dell PowerEdge 2300. The bios in this
>> particular machine will only allow me to boot from floppy or hard
>> drive. The CDrom drive is not bootable. It's very frustrating. I
>> tried the Dell forums first, but it seems there is no way to boot from
>> this CDrom.
>
> Why not open the box and plug in a separte CD drive? Or most
> PowerEdge's can network boot: or can you use a USB boot device?
>
> It's become increasingly difficult to fit a fully equipped kernel and
> installation tools into a floppy, which is partly why they've faded
> out of use so much.

I've never done this,
but I'm pretty sure it is possible to boot from a floppy
without putting the kernel on it.
I googled for "linux boot floppy" and got quite a few responses,
including <http://www.linuxmigration.com/quickref/install/media.html>
which seemed to contain a recipe for this.

I'm not sure if this is the same idea,
but I think you can create a grub floppy
which will serve the same purpose.

Also tomsrtbt is a very useful floppy
which allows you to partition your hard disk (if you want)
and manipulate it in various ways.
I think you could use it to transfer vmlinuz and initrd
to /boot on your hard disk,
and then you could add a stanza to grub.conf to boot from this.

In brief, I am pretty sure it is possible to do what you want,
if you undertake a little research.

--
Timothy Murphy
e-mail (<80k only): tim /at/ birdsnest.maths.tcd.ie
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland