Booting a 486 from a CD

Tinkering with the 486 in the vintage computer collection presents some interesting challenges. The computer no longer has a Linux system installed and has 16 MB of RAM. The BIOS is incapable of booting from the optical drive. There are no USB ports.

Browsing the house disk image file collection found a floppy disk image of grub4dos from the year 2010. That sounded ideal. Mounting the image file showed the contents looked fine. The floppy disk image contains two boot managers that can boot from CDs.

Testing the grub4dos floppy disk image in a virtual machine (VM) went fine.

Copying the floppy image file to a physical floppy disk went fine on a different vintage computer with a floppy disk drive.

After configuring the BIOS to boot from the floppy drive, the 486 booted with the grub4dos floppy disk. Selecting the Plop boot manager CDROM option had the system booting from the CD.

Posted: January 10, 2023 Category: Usability Tagged: General

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