[HOWTO] Boot CD on machines that don't support it in BIOS

[ozzymud]

OK, I've seen a lot of posts here and elsewhere about people trying to install Linux, Windows or some CD bootable OS on antique hardware that has no BIOS capabilities to boot from a CDROM.

Here is how I do it on my old thinkpads (and other machines that can't boot from CD)

Tools/Hardware needed:
1) An "other" PC with a floppy drive (internal or external)(windows used here, sbm is availible in many flavors: http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/about.html)
[I use a USB external IBM FRU 05K9283 as Windows XP also supports it at install for the F6 screen and also I dont have a floppy header on my new MB)
2) Smart Boot Manager: Self extracting floppy image at http://paulski.com/utilguides/sbm.exe
3) Your thinkpad with an internal floppy and CD drive for the bay

Steps:
1) On your "other" PC, download and run sbm.exe with a blank floppy in the drive, choose your floppy letter and click "Write disk"

2) On your target machine with floppy installed, boot from the newly created floppy
*Notice at this point, if you have a CDROM in the machine, SBM will BOOT from it, but we need to swap the CDROM into the machine in this case*
http://conradshome.com/thinkpad/sbm/sbm1.jpg

3) Scroll down with the arrow keys to highlight HD0 Harddisk

4) Press TAB to bring up the menu, scroll down to system settings, hit enter, scroll down to Install Smart BootManager and hit enter
http://conradshome.com/thinkpad/sbm/sbm2.jpg

5) An Information window will popup confirming you wish to install SBM on HD0, verify and press "y"
http://conradshome.com/thinkpad/sbm/sbm3.jpg

6) You should now see a success message, press any key and power off the machine

7) swap the floppy drive out for the CD drive, power on and quickly insert your bootable CD

8} You will now be greeted with the same menu you saw when 1st booting from floppy (now CD-ROM is listed in the menu)

9) Ensure a bootable cd is in the drive, scroll down to CD-ROM and press enter at this point you will prolly receive an error: Disk error! 0xAA
Continue by hitting any key and try hitting enter again, might take a few tries for it to initialize the CD.
http://conradshome.com/thinkpad/sbm/sbm4.jpg

10) That's it, as you can see, my ThinkPad is booting the Debian 6.0 netinst CD... whee
http://conradshome.com/thinkpad/sbm/sbm5.jpg

I've been using Smart Boot Manager since the turn of the century (been wanting to say that ). Not only to boot machines from CD-ROM but also as a boot manager for running multiple operating systems on different partitions. It's is a nice little app with MANY other features... check it out