I have a fairly old machine that can't boot any gentoo cd's. Actually, it's not just gentoo cd's it won't boot, but many unix cd's. I've tried booting Ubuntu, Gentoo, Mandrake 9.1, Knoppix 3.4 and 3.7, and FreeBSD. Of all the various ones i've tried, I've only had partial success with one, and thats Mandrake 9.1. But in order to boot that, I have to use the 2nd cd in the 3cd set. It uses some kind of alternate boot method that works on my old machine. cd1 in the mdk 9.1 set doesn't even try to boot just like every other unix I've tried to get to boot on my old machine. The machine does indeed support booting from cdrom, and the bios is set to try to boot from cdrom first. If possible would it be able to find out what mdk-9.1 did for the alterante boot method on cd2 and apply it to gentoo cd's booting. I really hate running an rpm based distro, especially one as old as mdk-9.1.
We could do with some more information -- does the machine not boot up at all with the Gentoo CD, i.e. do you not get the ISOLINUX prompt? Does it just hang, or display an error message? Or does it get past that and not boot the kernel? Or further still? Thanks.
It's possible that your BIOS is just old enough that it supports booting with floppy boot emulation and nothing else. When you boot that 2nd CD, see if there is anything on the screen right at the beginning about a virtual/emulated floppy drive. See if you can find a BIOS upgrade for your machine. If this is what's happening and you can't get an upgrade for your BIOS, you can try Smart Boot Manager available from http://btmgr.webframe.org/. Alternatively, you can probably do a gentoo install while booted from that 2nd CD. All you need is the ability to download files (wget, lynx, curl, etc.) and to chroot.
With a gentoo cd, and all other unix's tried, it's like it doesn't even see the mbr or whatever is on cd's to make them bootable. I get no boot prompt whatsoever from the cd. If there is an OS on the hd in the machine it jsut keeps chuggin right past attempting to boot from cd and goes straight to booting from the hd. If no OS is on the hd, then i get an error message saying no os found or something to that effect. I'll bot the mdk-9.1 cd2 later this evening or first thing in the morning and see if I see anything about an emulated/virtual floppy drive. As for booting off the mdk-9.1 cd2 and installing that way, doesn't quite work, once it loads the kernel, it has me insert cd1 and a normal mdk-9.1 install ensues. I even tried using mdk's rescue shell and performing an install that way, but when i attempt to chroot i get a kernel too old message, which is the same message i get if i try to install gentoo from the running mdk install. I haven't bothered upgrading the kernel on mdk cause it's usually a pita to upgrade the kernels on binary distro's, plus add the fact that i don't have any kernel source that has devfsd support in it, and i'd need that for mdk to boot properly.
I booted the 2nd cd of mdk 9.1 the other morning, and i didn't see anything about a virtual.emualted floppy drive anywhere, not even in dmesg in a rescue shell booted from the cd's. I'll give Smat Boot Manager a try and see how if that works next
Well, i went to the site for Smart Boot Manager, downlaoded the latest, 3.6-4, installed the required dependancies, and it won't build. It won't build on the machine i want to use it on, it won't build on my machine running gentoo, it just won't build. I know jack squat about asm so theres no chance i'll get it fixed. Last time i tried to build a stage1 install for pentium it failed miserably, i seem to remember bootstrap completing, but even that had bugs, no matter what system i'm building for, perl always fails if i have any cflags other then a march, -O2, -pipe, and -fomit-frame-pointer. emerge system when attempting to build for a pentium resulting in many many emerges failing with compilier errors, so I guess until a gentoo cd is made that'll boot my old machine, I'll just keep running a super old distro that will boot :-(
You could always use the alternate installation methods in the alternate install guide on www.gentoo.org to install from another CD that does boot. Unfortunately, we have no intentions on building a CD using floppy emulation simply due to the extra constraints that it puts on us on kernel size, as the entire kernel *must* fit into the size of a floppy.
