Other Help Topics :: Newbie question: older PC with hardware issues



Hi, and thank you for being.

I have a Gateway P-166, 48MB RAM, with a CD-ROM that's all but shot; I can't seem to get the screws to budge so I can replace the drive but it occurs to me that it might be easier and just as effective to drag DSL into its hard drive from a networked XP or Mandrake machine if it would be possible to boot from there.

Does anybody have any experience, insights, links, or search term suggestions on how I could do this? The Gateway is currently running Win95 and completely dependant on the other PCs as far as dragging needed files from the CD to a floppy when I have added network protocols, etc.

TYA and thank you for your patience with this 100% self taught "Make mistakes! Get messy!" type noob.
Simple solution:

1) Boot Gateway PC
2) Boot "other PC" and insert DSL CD-R disk into drive.
3) Share the "other PC" cdrom drive on the Windows network.
4) Connect to it from your Gateway PC.
5) Copy over the knoppix file so you have C:\knoppix\knoppix on your gateway hard drive.  Note the lower-case letters.
6) Use a computer with a floppy drive, the rawrite32 program and the DSL boot floppy image file from the website and create a DSL boot floppy disk.
7) Reboot your gateway computer with the boot floppy inserted into the floppy drive.
8) Enjoy DSL.
Aaaaaaaah!!!!!!

:D

<muscles visibly unclench>

Hardware is NOT one of my strong points. ;)

original here.