A few questions: 1. How old is older? Depending on the hardware, it might be easier to use an older version such as the 5 vice 6 series of Red Hat. Also, you need to check how much drive space is needed and if it's available. Best bet is to check out the HOWTO series and the text files with the distribution you have. It'll tell you what is absolutely necessary and what is good to have in the way of hardware, disk space, etc. Given that you've covered those bases you should be okay to continue. 2. If you don't have a CD reader, what is the format of your LINUX installation? If it's floppy, then fine, if you've got a CD then you'll have to get the files onto the correct media first. How did you make the disk you have in the first place? If you downloaded this and it's on a Windows partition, you'll have to ensure that once you've booted to the Linux kernel you can actually get to the files. 3. The bootable disks are normally made as a pair. To boot the kernel you need to make 2 disks. Check out the details of what you're reading and it should walk you through the process. The basics are as follows: (I have to assume you have access to the RAWRITE program.) Go to the DOSUTILS directory / folder and start the program RAWRITE. When prompted for the file enter BOOT.IMG and it'll ask for the location. Enter your floppy drive, probably A:. RAWRITE puts the image onto the disk and sends you back to your DOS prompt. The supplemental disk, the second one, is made in the same way and the image is SUPP.IMG. These two floppies will allow you to boot a basic Linux system completely from floppies and can be helpful in troubleshooting later problems. When you reboot with the boot floppy, you'll get a lot of data scrolling on the screen which is the kernel loading up. You have to take it from there to actually install the files on your hard drives. You need to partition in the correct format and so forth. Hope this helps. B. B. Mark Baars wrote: > Hello, First of all a merry cristmas to all of you! I have an older pc > without a cd rom player and want to install Linux Mandrake on it. From > the manual I understood that I have to make a bootable floppy from the > image file pcmia.img but that won't start up. Can anybody tell me how > to do it? Thanks in advance, Mark Baars
