Mageia forum

I have a pile of absolutely ancient x86 machines i need to keep running, and therefore backed up.
(mostly Win2K, some XP, some NeXTSTEP (PC) although the latter boot from CD, no issues.

Is there still a viable method of kickstarting an old system that won't even boot off CDROM?
(some are 1st gen USB1 w/no boot options other than floppy and HDD)

A floppy kickstart image was very common 6-10 years ago, but I have much older "mission critical" gear to keep running.

Knoppix used to have a boot floppy setup, just hoping that I can use a modern distro//tools for this.

Can it be done with Mageia3 and grub?
(with NO BIOS support for SCSI CD or USB boot)

I usually use partclone for imaging due to reliability and image verification capability.

Hi

Have you heard or used "plop"
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/index.html
An option I use is to install grub as a stand alone

or there is this
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Boot.iso_install

I believe that hd_grub.img and hd_grub-nonfree.img are the floppy images. They are in /distrib/3/i586/install/images on the mirrors.

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Instal ... _disk_boot

(We don't seem to have imported that page to our wiki, but I think that it still applies in general to Mageia.)

That wiki page also describes how to boot the installer directly from the hard drive, without any removable media at all.

Jim

Profuse thanks, I suspect plop is exactly what I was looking for.
(it has been ages since I actually needed to boot from floppy)

The need to boot from floppy is kind of outdated for most folks, but invaluable when working with sometimes ancient hardware that either cannot (or at least has not) been updated as it still gets the job done...

Please mark the thread accordingly by editing the topic of the first post and prefix it by [SOLVED], thanks