No bootprompt

[Harry Kuhman]

I see a file system.

That is good.

I think you are saying that a disc burned at low speed may work when one at higher speeds fails, even if both appear to be bit-identical. Am I understanding you correctly?

Yes.

[RossBoylan]

I tried inserting the Windows NT (4) CD and it did not boot. So I think the computer just isn't booting off of CD.

I also tried burning at lower speed (x4 was the lowest option, which seems odd); it didn't help.

I guess I need to make a boot floppy that will let me PXE boot.

Thanks everyone for your help.

[Harry Kuhman]

I tried inserting the Windows NT (4) CD and it did not boot. So I think the computer just isn't booting off of CD. ....

I guess I need to make a boot floppy that will let me PXE boot.

Well, it's old enough that there might be a CD booting issue. Is there an option in the BIOS to have the CD in the boot order? If not that's certainly a problem. If there is and it's enabled it still might be the issue, as some BOISes around this vintage just didn't get it quite right. One fix is to use a boot manager to boot the CD; I've done this on old systems that didn't even have the CD listed as a bootable device in the BIOS. Works good.

I can suggest two choices, but the FAQ that I keep referring to gives them also, so I guess there is no point in duplicating that information here. I think this would be a far better way to get things going than to try to get PXE and a PXE server working.

[OErjan]

the cd boot option worked for only a limited set of CD's mainly recovery disks with proprietary file system and boot procedure... they where %&%/() unreliable even then.

[RossBoylan]

One fix is to use a boot manager to boot the CD; I've done this on old systems that didn't even have the CD listed as a bootable device in the BIOS. Works good.

I can suggest two choices, but the FAQ that I keep referring to gives them also, so I guess there is no point in duplicating that information here. I think this would be a far better way to get things going than to try to get PXE and a PXE server working.

You're right; that's easier. Unfortunately, I tried smart boot and still couldn't get it to boot off the CD. The CD was detected as hdc (I think), which isn't quite what the docs indicated would happen. I got a disk error when I tried to boot it. The atapi controller seems to use 2 pairs of ports; I tried each pair in turn (setting it explcitly), but no luck.

I have got a diskette that does PXE booting on the machine; I still need to figure out what files to hand to it from the server to finish that boot.