Selecting 2.4 Kernel on Boot Floppy Debian Install

[Charles Steinkuehler]

Leo J Mauler wrote:
> I am installing Debian on my Laptop, which does not boot from CD.  I
> would like to boot from floppies, then use the built-in 4x CDROM as the
> installation media.  The 4x CDROM works rather well considering its age.

You might try using the Smart Boot Manager (sbm.bin in the install 
directory of CD1 on my 3.0 r1 CD set).  From the sbm README:

What's the use of SBM on the CD then ?

   SBM includes an IDE driver that allows us to boot the cds even on
   machines with a BIOS that wouldn't support booting from CD, provided
   our CDROM is an IDE one, that is, so you can make a SBM floppy and
   boot from it and then tell it to boot from your CDROM.

   Also, there are some cases where the BIOS would allow booting from the
   CD but isolinux fails to boot from there, in this case you can either
   boot using a CD other than the first, as the others don't use
   isolinux, or you can make a SBM floppy and boot from this floppy and
   then tell SBM to boot your CDROM.

> The problem is that I would like to use the 2.4 kernel and the ext3
> filesystem.  Debian 3.0 r0 defaults to the 2.2 kernel and the ext2
> filesystem.
> 
> I boot the system using the rescue.bin and the root.bin floppies.  I have
> dd'ed the "bf24.bin" to a floppy, but the laptop will not boot using that
> disk, so I boot with the rescue and root floppies.

Crawling around, I'm not sure the bf24.bin is a boot floppy...it looks 
like lin24 is the 2.4 kernel, and bf24.bin is the initial ramdisk.  If 
you can't get the sbm thing to work, you might have to craft a bootable 
syslinux floppy with lin24 by hand, although it seems like someone would 
have done this already.

> Someone said on this list that to use the 2.4 kernel one put in "bf2.4"
> at the boot prompt.  When I do this it states "Could not find bf2.4
> kernel".  I've even tried swapping out floppies at the boot prompt,
> putting in the "bf24.bin" floppy and then typing "bf2.4".  I get the same
> message when the "bf24.bin" floppy is sitting in the floppy drive.

I'm not sure the documentation has kept up with the current state of 
things.  To install using bf2.4, I booted off CD5 of the 3.0r1 CD set.

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net