2008-10-24

SBM that adds USB boot support?

Having recently demoted my old ThinkPad 240x to Debian/Testing testbed, I wanted to re-install Debian from scratch on it, to make sure that I would have a clean reference system to work with.

However, this being a very old ThinkPad model, there is no CD-ROM drive to speak of. The only external means of booting is with an optional floppy disk drive. Sure enough, there exists a nice helper called SBM (included in the utility folder on all Debian CDs since several releases) that adds CD-ROM boot support to any BIOS.

Instead, My idea would be to perform the reinstall using the USB stick version of Debian-Installer, bootstrapped by SBM on the floppy disk. Does anybody know of an SBM release that adds USB boot support? If not, is there any other tool that performs a similar trick?

2 comments:

lm said...

If your BIOS supports it, you could try to to boot in "USB-ZIP-mode". See here for details: http://syslinux.zytor.com/doc/usbkey.txt

Martin-Éric said...

It really has no means of booting from anything else that floppy disk or internal HDD.