i have a old laptop, ibm thinkpad 600e. i've had so many problems with this thing i'll try to spare the details and get to the point. it will not boot from cd no matter what you do. it also has many motherboard problems and the trackpoint will never work again. it is currently running windows 98 1st edition and it was a miracle how i got that on. now i was wondering if somehow using boot.ini file, i could have the bootloader give an option to boot from cd as well as just booting from the hard drive. i would like to use live cds of linux on there, and also if i ever needed to reformat, that would be my only way to do it seeing that THERE IS NO FLOPPY DRIVE. last time i reformated i needed to put the hard drive into another computer, and part way through, pull it out.

so i was curious if there was a way i could create a boot.ini option to allow you to boot from cd.

if not that is there a 3rd party boot loader i can download that would allow me to do that without affecting the win98 on the hard drive now?

thanks for your time

-Thebinaryman

AFAIK the only way to boot off a CD is to set it up in BIOS to try firing up off a CD before trying the hard drive, and this of course is assuming that your BIOS supports such a thing in the first place, though it sounds like yours does.

By the time it's started looking at boot.ini, it won't be able to see the CD anyway until Windows has loaded. So that's a no-go area. Plus that file only supports hard drive/partitions anyway AFAIK.

Plus bootloaders and Windows have never really got on with each other and a screwed boot sector means nothing will boot then.

This post has been edited by Neil Jones: Oct 27 2005, 03:01 PM