Install Gentoo with CD Floppy Emulation

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

This article is part of the HOWTO series.

Installation • Kernel & Hardware • Networks • Portage • Software • System • X Server • Gaming • Non-x86 • Emulators • Misc

Submitted for your consideration: You're installing Gentoo on a new (or old) peice of hardware. However, there's a few quirks...

• It has a hard drive, but it's brand new.
• It has a CD drive, but the BIOS on the hardware will only boot CD's that have a floppy emulation image on them.
• None of Gentoo's LiveCD's have floppy emulation.

Thankfully, there are ways around it -- and this one uses Slackware's ZipSlack.

Contents 1 What you need 2 Setting things up. 2.1 A small note... 3 Boot it up.

[edit] What you need

• A Parallel-port Zip 100 drive
• A CD burner, unless the target system has a working floppy drive, therefore you can use a single floppy disk instead.

[edit] Setting things up.

You need to pull the latest ZipSlack, and unzip the file onto a blank Zip-100 disk. You then need to put the boot floppy image onto the floppy, or if the drive's broke or missing, as the floppy emulation image of a (hopefully rewritable) CD.

[edit] A small note...

Be careful of the size of ZipSlack. ZipSlack 10.2 is a bit larger than advertized, requiring you to remove linux/root/swapfile, linux/usr/man, and linux/usr/doc to get it under 98 megs before copying it over. Thankfully, ZipSlack runs on the old UMSDOS filesystem in kernel 2.4.x, so this last bridge will work.

[edit] Boot it up.

Attach the Zip drive to the target PC, put the prepared disk in the drive, but your boot CD or floppy in, and start the target PC. Within a few minutes, you'll have a slow but stable Linux system to build off of.

You now can install Gentoo using the "Gentoo from another Distro" section of the "Alternate Gentoo Install Guide."