M de Luis writes:
My old NEC Versa P440 laptop computer has no working CD drive, and can't boot off a USB thumb drive. It does have a USB connected 1.44" floppy drive that came with a rescue disk, so I believe that it may be able to boot off that.Okay then, how do I make a 1.44" Linux boot disk (boot/ root pair?) with enough USB capability to let me mount a USB thumb drive, one loaded with a Net based Fedora installation iso? Bit confused about how I might invoke the USB stick's Network based installation then, should I actually manage to get a boot a basic system up from floppies?Please, just vague ideas are all that's really required. If there are any relevant links with which I could be very gratefully provisioned, then I'm sure to realize a solution, provided that one may be possible in this case.
Unless my brain cells are giving out, old 3.5" floppies hold only 1.44mb of data.
Given that a modern kernel is already four times that big, I just can't see any way of bootstrapping off that. I don't think that even grub can fit onto a floppy (let's revisit the entire escapade of grub blowing up when the first partition starts at sector 63).
There might be ancient Linux distros, based around circa 2.0-version kernels floating out there, that might have a boot/root install path. But kernels of that vintage are not likely to have much, if any USB support.
You'll just have to get that CD drive fixed.
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