Iÿÿm not sure what a pendrive is but by usb floppy what i meant was a
usb stick with a floppy disk image written to it. Iÿÿm not sure what
bioses support. Maybe they all support hard disk images. Another
question i have - did they ever make laptops with 8086 or 80286
processors?
syslinux or grub will be happy to boot any OS PC from any media supported
by your BIOS. If you BIOS recognize an USB pen, of suitable size, as a
bootable device, syslinux or grub will try to boot from it a CD, DVD or HD
image.
Your BIOS may even be able to try to boot from network, using PXE, on a
completely diskless system, if you have the right things up and running
on your local area network (dhcp, tftpd, ftpd or httpd).
It is what I normally use to boot crashed systems from my network, to
restore an OS bacula backup.
Floppies are memories of the past, it is even difficult to find a floppy
installed on a notebook of the last ten years.
When I'm "disconnected" from my personal networks, any USB dongle may boot
a complete hercules environment.
The oldest of my notebooks, an ACER of 1999, would boot in its 512Mb
memory a suitable Linux distro able to IPL at least an MVS3.8j, from
USB, CD, floppy or PXE.
To find a system with less than 64Mb, I would need to go back at least to
the middle of ninety, I should still have one of the these systems around.
Here things begin to become interesting ;-)
For less than 64Mb, I would need to be lucky enough my oldest PC, a 486DX
with 16Mb, 1991, still boot from a floppy, if even still turn on
correctly, after 20 years of silence.
That the only system I still own, which would require to boot from a
floppy. I guess its BIOS woudn't be able to boot from an IDE DVD and
finding an IDE or SCSI CD may start to become difficult in these days
(still possible I guess). This has an ISA bus architecture, so, boot from
PXE is probably impossible.
Peppe.
--
Giuseppe Vitillaro | E-Mail : ***@vitillaro.org
CNR - ISTM | 06123 Perugia Phone:+39.075.585-5518
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