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What is it

Smart Boot Manager (SBM) is an OS independent and full-featured boot manager with an easy-to-use user interface. There are some screenshots available.

The main goals of SBM are to be absolutely OS independent, flexible and full-featured. It has all of the features needed to boot a variety of OSes from several kinds of media, while keeping its size no more than 30K bytes. In another words, SBM does NOT touch any of your partitions, it totally fits into the first track (the hidden track) of your hard disk!

SBM now supports booting from floppy, hard disk and CD-ROM. There are plans to support ZIP and LS-120 in the near future.
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http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Downloading_FAQ

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Smart Boot Manager

If your BIOS does not support booting from a CD at all, or if it has that feature but doesn't seem to recognize the Knoppix CD as bootable (and you believe that you burnt it properly), there is a tool called Smart Boot Manager. Get the Smart Boot Manager installer, and install SBM to floppy, this should let you boot from any bootable CD. Download Smart Boot Manager. (http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/download.html) If you want to install from windows, download the sbminst.exe and run it from the Command Prompt like : sbminst.exe -d 0 to install to floppy drive. SBM can also be install to your hard drive's Master Boot Record, so you will not need a floppy at all to boot the CD.

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Note Windows XP will not allow rewriting the MBR (Master Boot Record) so you will have to burn copies either to CD-ROM or Floppy. Images are available for both. Since you say your system is an older one does it allow booting off a CD-COM? If not an older system should have a Floppy Drive.

For the floppy version visit http://en.opensuse.org/Install_on_PC_that_can't_boot_from_CD

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The site also has something to say about "Grub and Grub booting". Perhaps this fix your problems with it.
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Grub and Grub booting

Grub is unfriendly but very powerfull. The only thing you need to know is that:

* Grub has a mini console available by hitting ESC (from graphic start only) then "c" (the lower case letter c), to get an usual prompt (">").
* Grub uses a QWERTY keyboard, be sure to have the conversion at hand if you don't use this one;
* Grub names the hard drives and partition beginning by 0 (zero) when anywhere else they are named from 1. First disk is (hd0), third partiton of the second disk is (hd1,2).
* with this and any Grub you can boot anything .

So:

* start any grub (your old install, any floppy - this works only at boot time);
* to give the linux file, type:

> kernel (hd0,0)/boot/linux root=/dev/hda1

* to give the initrd file type:

> initrd (hd0,0)/boot/initrd

* boot:

> boot

Of course (hd0,0) must be your parameters and so must be the path. But Grub uses completion, so hitting <TAB> makes the work very easy (Grub can see the folders and files on the disk, and even shows you the content of the folders, try it).

Replace (hd0,0) and /dev/hda1 as necessary, depending from which drive and partition you are booting.

Then your are done

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Documentation at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/docs/user-guide-4.html

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If you want to make the the ISO version so you can boot it from CD visit http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=41498

See If you want to make the SBM floppy simply then download the self-extractor (or the iso if you want it on a CD) from http://www.iol.ie/~krakowangus/sbm/sbm.htm

http://www.iol.ie/~krakowangus/sbm/sbmiso.zip

Enjoy