True Image diskette plus CD-ROM boot?

I have an older computer that has a floppy and a CD-ROM, but the BIOS does not support booting from CD-ROM. I would like to use "bare metal" imaging and recovery on this system. I have used Media Builder to create a 10 diskette boot set, and I have also created a bootable CD-ROM. Booting from 10 diskettes is SLOW! What I would like to do is to start the boot process from diskette, but then have the rest of the process use the CD-ROM. Would it be possible to create a modified version of the first diskette so that it loaded the rest of the files from CD-ROM? If not, I can easily build a bootable Win98 diskette that has CD-ROM drive access. Since the bootable CD-ROM seems to be a Linux based product, would it be possible to use something like loadlin.exe to load the kernel and initrd ramdisk?

 

Hi Stephen,

apologies if you have already done this, but in your position my first call would be to try and update the BIOS. Have you looked into this?

F.

 

Yes, my BIOS is at the latest level available, but it still does not support booting from CD-ROM.

 

Hi Stephen,

I think you have quite a challenge on your hands, the BIOS is the important thing here.

As a possible (somewhat bizarre) work-round, have you though about installing a second hard disk which you boot into an OS which is compatible with ATI and can coexist with the one on your main drive (This could be MS or Linux). The disk does not need to be large and so would be very inexpensive. The idea being that instead of relying on an optical disk or the hassle and time of 10 floppy disks to do a bare metal restore, you simple reconfigure your BIOS to boot from your 'maintenance' disk and take it from there.

You could take an image of this disk, and if a double disaster struck and you lost the disk you could restore it using floppies.

F.