EXTREMELY old-school installation woes

[Dai_trying]

One option I have used on an old machine that only booted from floppy/cd and I wanted to use a 1.4Gb iso (live-cd) to boot from and then install was to boot the live-cd from grub from the Hdd, it was something of a marathon to get it there and involved loading the image via a loop mount and then booting into it. This would mean you need to have a working Distro already on the system though so may not be helpful to you.
If you need more info of how I boot it let me know and I will fire up the old machine and get the relevant details from it.

[Ray Ingles]

One option I have used on an old machine that only booted from floppy/cd and I wanted to use a 1.4Gb iso (live-cd) to boot from and then install was to boot the live-cd from grub from the Hdd, it was something of a marathon to get it there and involved loading the image via a loop mount and then booting into it. This would mean you need to have a working Distro already on the system though so may not be helpful to you.
If you need more info of how I boot it let me know and I will fire up the old machine and get the relevant details from it.

That does sound useful, and I may be able to use the broken installation I have to do that. If you get the chance to find that info, please do let me know!

[pcalvert]

Sadly, as I noted in my first post of this thread, I'm dealing with a "1993 BIOS that can only boot off floppy or IDE hard drive". Booting from floppy seems to be my only recourse. For example, the Plop boot manager floppy image couldn't boot off of CD on this system.

If you go back and read my previous replies, you'll see that I gave you a potential solution for that problem. As for Plop boot manager, I never had any success with it, so your experience doesn't surprise me.

Phil