Quote Originally Posted by monkymind
Have you tried booting the CD with Smart Boot Manager http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ Someone on this board mentioned it a while back and I now use it extensively for booting CDs on old PCs.

BTW you can use it on a floppy or install it on the HD
Yes, I recently rediscovered this neet little boot manager. Now I use it from a boot floppy as its faster than the kernel based one (looks for vmlinuz and miniroot.gz on the CD, not on the floppy - speeds up boot). But you mention that you use this from the hdd? I'm curious, how do you do this and what benefit do you get from this?

On a related topic: I have my students boot the compressed KNOPPIX image file from hda1 on a WONDOZE partition using the slow boot floppy. Is there any way to speed booting the image from the hdd? Maybe I could partition about 1GB, call it hda2, and use the fast boot disk to boot that? 1GB should be big enough as the image file is about 695MB - would a 700MB partition be enough?

I think that http://btmgr.sf.net can boot from any bootable partition you tell it to look for. I'm using this method to boot my MORPHIX CDs now. Its very quick, that's how I rediscovered this little gem (see http://www.morphix.org). I think I reviewed btmgr months ago for use with KNOPPIX and found it a bit buggy then, but its very nice now. Well, I've been using the version on http://www.morphix.org, is that different from the one on http://btmgr.sf.net?

BTW, the powers that be at my school do not want me setting up a dual boot situtaion, ie: knx-hdinstall and lilo are out. The KNOPPIX boot floppy is OK (to boot the CD or from /mnt/hda1/knoppix), the MORPHIX boot floppy is OK (to boot CD) and loadlin is OK, but that's about it! BTW, what they don't know won't hurt me. So if I have to make a 1GB partition, I will. But, I'm sure they don't want me doing that either, so if I could do this without partitioning, let me know!

Frustrated Teacher,