[syslinux] Any way to boot a CD if no BIOS support & CD-ROM is not 100% standard?

[Nazo]

On 11/19/05, Geert Stappers <stappers at stappers.nl> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 11:58:30PM -0600, Nazo wrote:
> > I originally asked in a hardware/software forum, but, got basically no
> > results.  It occured to me that if anyone would know, it would be you
> > people.  What I'm wanting to do is set up a rescue disc for a really
> > old laptop.  It needs to boot up a linux based CD, hopefully with
> > minimal to no working stuff on the harddrive (I plan to put a floppy
> > image to be written to a disk when needed to do the actual booting.)
>
>  <bigsnip> (SBM is Smart Boot Manager) </bigsnip>
>
>
> AFAICT is a laptop with an add-on CD-ROM drive
> but no BIOS support to boot from that drive.
>
>
> The most clean solution would be updating the BIOS.
> Contact the manufactor for detailed information.
>
> I have no clue how much they will charge for it.
>
>
>
> What about booting from floppy?
>
>
> GSt
>
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>
Upgrade the BIOS?  Are you kidding me?  We're not talking a simple
flash here, you'd have to REPLACE the BIOS.  This is a ~1995 system,
not a 2000+ one...  It just simply lacks the capability and if it can
get it via a flash, I realy seriously doubt they ever would have made
one for such a system anyway, and they sure as heck aren't going to
for one little ordinary user rather than some business running
thousands of the things or something.  Seriously though, I really
doubt Toshiba supports a laptop they made a decade ago.  Last I
checked they showed no sign of this anyway that I've been able to
find.  I can't blame them, I wouldn't expect anyone to.  If someone
asked me to support something I did for them ten years ago, I'd just
laugh at them.  It's not a question of money because I'm not BIll
Gates, so I don't have enough money to make it feasible for them to
try to rig up some kind of bios upgrade for me.

Now, floppy booting works.  That's what I was saying earlier.  I had
hoped I could figure out how to get SBM to boot the CD-ROM and I
planned to use it via floppy.  My intention is to, once I get
something that works, include a disk image on the restore CD so that
it can be written to floppy.  My intention is to not rely on a floppy
disk to last as long as a CDR for the person I'm selling this system
to later.  (Floppies have the annoying tendency to die in a matter of
weeks in some bad cases, years in the best cases.  Whereas CDRs, if
you take care of them, theoretically promise up to 10 years. 
Theoretically...)

Right now the only solution I've found is directly booting.  Thing is,
the kernel+initrd for anything I wish to boot MUST fit on the floppy,
and I have to implement such a solution on a case by case basis, and
there were one or two bootable CDs that I thought might benefit that
person, not just the restoration disc I'm planning to rig up.