Booting Plain ISO on a laptop with no CD

[wutske 0]

I'd like to run a live cd on a very old laptop, but it only has a backpack parallel port cd-rom of wich I can not boot.
So my idea was to put the ISO file on the hdd and try to boot it using some software.
So far, I've tried grub4dos ( http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/ ), which didn't work at all.
I've tried ISOemu (wich I loaded using a modified version of Grub) ( http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?shoic=8955= ), it finds the partition, but fails when it has to find out wich type (it's fat32, converted from fat16) it it's, so that doesn't work either.
I've also tried RedHat5.x boot floppy, they seem to have backpack driver, but that doesn't work either (+ I don't want to install linux, I want to boot it).

Does anybody know how on earth I could boot an ISO file from a hdd ?

Ps. the laptop is DX4 120Mhz , no cd, 2Gb hdd, floppy and Win98SE installed.

[dhanesh1405241511 0]

Googled a bit and found out 2 links that could be of use, tho they might not be related to what ur doing, but would give you an idea.

 

Link 1

Link 2

 

On the other hand, if you have an external HDD, y dont you use that as a USB boot ? Just a suggestion. A Thumb drive is of less space, so if you have sumthing like a 4GB thumb drive .. you could easily boot from it on startup.

 

Regards

Dhanesh.

[Markymark2 0]

y dont you use that as a USB boot ? Just a suggestion. A Thumb drive is of less space, so if you have sumthing like a 4GB thumb drive .. you could easily boot from it on startup.

Well if the laptop is old enough NOT to have a cdrom built in so it uses that outside the box cd solution ( I had a toshiba the same) it will NOT have any kind of support in the BIOS for anything apart from booting from a floppy or a HD.

Been in the same situation with older laptops having to make driver boot floppies to get cdroms to be recognised.


Hope you can find an answer!

Marky;)

[dhanesh1405241511 0]

Well if the laptop is old enough NOT to have a cdrom built in so it uses that outside the box cd solution ( I had a toshiba the same) it will NOT have any kind of support in the BIOS for anything apart from booting from a floppy or a HD.

Wouldent a BIOS update and a PS2-USB converter help ? I mean that was my intention while posting. If there isnt a BIOS update available for your laptop, then the USB idea could be dropped.

OR .. doing it the hard way lol .. remove ur HDD and connect it to USB on your desktop via an external case. You normally get the external case with an adapter and USB connectivity for cheap nowadays. Connect it to your desktop, install what u have to from there and then connect the HDD again to your laptop ..

Regards
Dhanesh.

[yordan 10]

wutske asks how to boot from iso. And all the answers say "try something else". I guess the already tried the other methods, so now he needs to use a virtual CD able to boot from iso.By the way, you can install Mandrake from iso : you get the boot.iso which is on the first CD, you boot on it, and you tell it to install from the iso file. Of course, this is valid for mandrake, but probably the oder distros do the same thing.