EXTREMELY old-school installation woes

[Ray Ingles]

Well, the third time's the charm. I repartitioned the disk and made sure there was a /boot partition right at the start of the drive (ancient BIOS limitation) and I was able to get a netinst installation to boot off the hard drive and start configuration. I was even able to update /etc/apt/sources.list to point to archive.debian.org/debian, and it found the packages.

Sadly, it failed to install some, and I'd hit the end of my time budget for the day, but it looks like I'll be able to get this thing running, eventually. If I can boot off the hard disk and get to the network, that should be sufficient.

Well, the base install seems to have failed. It can't install any of the packages; I see things like 'dpkg-maintscript-helper: command not found' and such. Has anyone run into something like that before, on older Debian installs?

[pcalvert]

Hi Ray,

Why don't you download the Debian 3.1 r8 netinstall ISO and install using that?

Phil

[Ray Ingles]

Why don't you download the Debian 3.1 r8 netinstall ISO and install using that?

Well, unfortunately, I did. As I noted on June 25th, "I played with the "cd-drivers" floppy image and managed to get the floppy-based installer to see the contents of the "netinst" CD. I was able to get an installation onto the disk..." Unfortunately, that's the install that doesn't successfully finish setting up properly. Apt seems to be in a broken state at the end. I can boot and log in, but without being able to install any new packages it's not terribly useful.

[pcalvert]

What I meant was don't use the floppy-based installer; boot from the netinstall CD and use its built-in Debian installer.

Phil

[Ray Ingles]

What I meant was don't use the floppy-based installer; boot from the netinstall CD and use its built-in Debian installer.

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.

[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