I've found the Slackware path being a 'very simple' way of getting Gentoo
installed on some of my more hardware-challenged computers. Initially I
resisted, thinking that "Gentoo should be able to do this on it's own", and
that "I don't want to learn yet another distro", but finally I gave in. ;-)
Slackware rocks for this purpose. (Not to say that it's less good in other
areas.)
BTW, I found http://www.kerstner.org/tutorials/gentoo_floppyinstall.html to
be very helpful. (It's not an absolute step-by-step guide, but very close.)
And yes, four empty floppies cannot be that hard to find. Look in your old
drawers. Look in some old socks in your wardrobe. (Doh!) Old diskettes tend
to lay around in the most remarkble spots in your house. Even if only some
of them works with format today, you will surely come up with enough to get
four working floppies. And then, you will clean out some old ones that
don't work any more to the dust bin.
If you really, really, really do not have any floppies at home any more,
then you might just go out and buy a set. They are quite cheap these days.
Biker
|---------+----------------------------------->
| | "A. S. Budden" |
| | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]|
| | .vispa.com> |
| | |
| | 10-10-2003 16:39 |
| | Please respond to |
| | gentoo-user |
| | |
|---------+----------------------------------->
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
|
|
| To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
|
| cc: (bcc: Gustav Schaffter/CDS/CG/CAPITAL)
|
| Subject: [gentoo-user] Installing without CDs
|
>---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
Hi there,
I'm hoping to install Gentoo onto my laptop. It's a sony vaio
PCG-R600HEP with a docking station that contains a firewire CDRW/DVDROM
and a floppy drive. It's also got a network card etc.
I have tried various ways of getting the installation started but have
failed every time. However I boot, whichever boot options I pass to the
acpi kernel, it starts booting and then fails with the message shown
at the bottom.
As well as every option I could think of for booting from the Gentoo CD,
I've made a CD of Knoppix, but this fails as well, unable to find the
CD.
In the past I've managed to install Redhat 9 (not on the computer
anymore -- I did a complete restart with the windows recovery disc that
came with it and then shrunk the windows partition down to 3GB with
partition magic), but I did that by using the boot floppy that came with
it and then installing by ftp from another computer on the local
network.
Since Gentoo is supposed to be a network installed system anyway, is
this possible? I couldn't find any bootdisk images and the only
references I've seen on the web talk about using slackware to get it
started. Is it necessary to use a four disk system? I don't even own
four floppy disks! Is there an easier way?
Many thanks for any pointers,
Al
Messages:
Keymap selection: 40
---- Loading 40 keymap
mount: Mounting /newroot/dev/cdroms/* on /newroot/mnt/cdrom failed: No
such file or directory
---- CD not found
umount: /newroot: Device or resource busy
BusyBox v0.60.5 (2003.07.21-01:15+0000) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
#
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