Thanks everyone for the replies.... I ended up upgrading the BIOS on the motherboard to get the boot from CDROM to work. That was a feat upon itself because the motherboard manufacturer was out of business. Luckily I had another out of work machine with the same motherboard and a newer BIOS that I could copy. Now I am able to install directly from CD. Thanks. Gilbert ________________________________ From: plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:plug-discuss-admin@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] On Behalf Of Mark Jarvis Sent: Wednesday, March 16, 2005 12:31 PM Cc: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us Subject: Re: Debian Boot Floppies Since my original reply post is being held up by PLUG post size restrictions, I'll do what I probably should have done in the first place and post a copy of a page from the Debian website with its references: Smart Boot Manager This nifty little floppy bootdisk allows selecting various devices to boot from a menu, and even allows booting a CD-ROM in machines where the BIOS doesn't support it. If your BIOS supposedly supports booting from a CD-ROM but that feature isn't working, this disk might be just what you need! Download and write this SBM sbootmgr.dsk floppy image. (from slackware.at ) For writing floppy images from Microsoft Windows, try one of these programs or see debian manual . Linux has a great program called dd for writing disk images: # dd if=image of=/dev/fd0 (where image is the image filename) Floppy disks are one of the least reliable media around, so be prepared for some bad disks. It's a good idea to compare the written floppy disk with the image file. (Linux users can use cmp). If that fails, throw that floppy away and try another one. Label your floppies. debian install howto SBM home page Mark Jarvis wrote: Following a tip last month in plug, I downloaded a copy of Smart Boot Manager from the Slackware site. It's great! Allows booting from any bootable partition or your CD/DVD drive. I use it as an All-in-one emergency boot disk. It's small, so I've attached it here. I can't guarantee that it'll allow booting from REALLY old CD drives, but it's worth a try. It's a disk image, so use rawrite3 (Windows) or dd (Linux) to create the image on a formatted floppy. Hope it works. -mj- Gilbert T. Gutierrez, Jr. wrote: Has anyone had difficulty making boot disks for Debian Woody? I cannot for the life of me make boot disks. I have tried dd on a RedHat box and used Windows utilities. All of the floppies I make are non-bootable and non-readable. Any suggestions? Gilbert --- [ This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Phoenix Internet ] [ Phoenix Internet http://www.phoenixinternet.net ] --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss --- [ This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Phoenix Internet ] [ Phoenix Internet http://www.phoenixinternet.net ] --- [ This E-mail was scanned for viruses by Phoenix Internet ] [ Phoenix Internet http://www.phoenixinternet.net ] --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change you mail settings: http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss