[lug] Installation Guidance Needed

[Peter Hutnick]

D. Stimits said:
> ...

> One additional note on this part: If you have a windows machine running,
>  the command which copies images to a floppy is rawwrite.exe (or is it
> spelled rawrite?).

It is rawrite.exe.  I insist on pronouncing it "ar eh write" due to its
spelling.  I'll stop when someone convinces me that writing a disk image
to a floppy is a "divine or solemn service." ;-)

> CD drives old enough to be from the 486 days had
> proprietary interfaces, and did not use a common IDE cable...plus the
> BIOS did not understand bootable CD's, so you have two strikes against
> CD boot on such a machine. If you were to get a newer CD drive for
> cheap, it would be useful, but there is a very strong chance it wouldn't
>  work anyway (the BIOS issue again).

This chance is approximately 100%.  The El Torito spec went 1.0 in January
of '95.  The Pentium was released in March of '93.  Curtis Stevens claims
that he first started thinking about it in November of '93.

By the time there was anything usable in place no one was designing new
486 support systems any more.

Early Pentiums don't boot from CD either.  As a rule of thumb, if it
doesn't have USB ports it probably won't boot from the CD drive.

-Peter