How to make boot floppy?

[kynn]

Still, I'm very surprised that you say a Dell of this apparent vintage does not support booting from floppy.

I don't know much about hardware in general, so I can't tell how surprising or not it is that this machine won't boot from the CD-ROM drive. All I know is that if I restart the machine (either by selecting "Restart" from the "Start->Shut Down" menu, or selecting "Shut down" followed by restarting the machine), I never see the Knoppix screen come up; instead, I see the usual Windows 98 start up sequence. I do hear noises coming from the CD-ROM drive right before the Windows 98 start up sequence kicks in, suggesting that the machine is aware of the CD-ROM drive, but nothing comes of it.

I also see no reason from what you posted that would account for SBM not working with that system, but I'm not convinced yet that the computer does not boot from CD natively.

Again, that's what I see. With the SBM flooppy inserted, the machine seems to be unable to recognize the CD-ROM drive and the Zip drive altogether. If I remove the SBM floppy and restart the machine, they are once again recognized. I learned that the CD-ROM is a Toshiba DVD-ROM SD-M1202. I still can't figure out what its IO ports are, though.

kj