1

I have a very old PC that currently has no functioning HDD and only a CD-ROM drive (no DVD-ROM).

There is no way to boot it from a USB drive.

Can I still get a Ubuntu Live CD image that could be used to boot the computer? The DVD images are all too large to fit on a CD-R.

There is no network connection.

The reason I am using this machine is because it is the only one I could find with a floppy drive. I need to copy the contents of a floppy disk onto, say, a USB drive. Therefore the distro should include drivers for the floppy drive and USB drive too.

Sure, I could just buy a USB floppy drive instead, but where's the fun in that?

As some commenters said, this machine is almost certainly 32 bit architecture. So, a 64 bit .iso will not work.

feedMe
  • 163

2 Answers2

1

There is a Network Booting CD image you can download and burn to CDR. That gets you booted, but not much else.

As an alternative, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ThinClients introduces how to boot a diskless PC from a Ubuntu server set up to host Thin Clients, and refers you to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP and the Linux Terminal Server Project for information on how to set up an Ubuntu Server for this task.

It uses PXE to boot a machine with no drive at all, uses dnsmasq or isc dhcp to get an IP address for the old machine, sends a compressed image to the old PC to be extracted into memory to run from, and boots faster than booting from CD on most networks.

K7AAY
  • 17,705
0
  • In this case I think it is easiest to try a very small linux distro outside the Ubuntu family, for example Tiny Core or Puppy Linux.

  • An alternative, if there is USB, is to boot via a PloP CD disk, that provides a driver to chainboot via USB and that way be able to boot into a modern full-size 32-bit linux distro, for example Lubuntu 18.04.1 LTS or Debian live version 10.2.

    There is also a problem with RAM. If there is not enough RAM to run a modern full-size 32-bit linux distro, again, I think the best alternative is to try a very small linux distro outside the Ubuntu family, for example Tiny Core or Puppy Linux.

Community
  • 1
sudodus
  • 47,684