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Now, I find Peek & Poke very odd, but in the past was magic. I Even create my own Peek & Poke t-shirts here

You can see it on my own geek t-shirts list :-)

There are times when you have a CD-ROM drive that simply would not co-operate. It does not matter what OS, you've downloaded the ISO, have it burnt, then put it inside the drive, change the BIOS setting to boot from the CD-ROM and simply reboot the machine.

But the darn thing would not boot.

I have this problem usually on older machines or just simply on an older CD-ROM drives (on relatively newer machines too).

My solution? Either changing CD-ROM drive and hope it works or a simpler alternative - Smart Boot Manager - http://btmgr.webframe.org/

Usually there's no problem in booting up from Floppy.. SBM floppy will boot up and present you with a menu asking where do you want to boot from. Just select CD-ROM and voila!

Well, it works for me. Even on machines whose BIOS does not even support booting from CD-ROM.

(Disclaimer - If it still doesn't work, chances are either the CD-ROM really needs replacement or it's an error between keyboard and the chair)

Peace all!

you need

btmgr

http://btmgr.webframe.org/

There's also sbootmgr, or Smart Boot Manager: http://btmgr.webframe.org/index.php3?body=download .html.

It's better to try something like Smart Boot Manager. It brings up a menu allowing you to boot from any of your listed devices.

I have used it several times when installing Linux on older laptops that do not allow CD-booting.

Simplified Backup on CD or DVD for Linux
Purpose:
backup large amounts of data on one or more CDs or DVDs,
simple (therefore no excuse not to do the backup),
no special tool needed for reading the backup

smbinst.exe -d 0

with a clean, formatted floppy in the drive - which should install the smart boot manager to the floppy.

Set your BIOS to boot from the floppy first if necessary, and you should then get the smart boot manager menu - one option of which is to boot the cdrom.

The advantage of doing all this is that it bypasses your crappy computer BIOS, and uses the loader on the floppy instead to boot the CDROM.

By using the bootmanager floppy to boot your knoppix CD, you should be able to boot knoppix, mount your windows drive, and copy all your files to another hard-drive or network share.

With boot from floppy and install to hard drive, can get some use out of those 10 year old Pentium PCs that have Windows 95 (infected, of course) on a 1G hard drive and can't boot CDs. I know, I know, who'd want to bother with such obsolete hardware when $100 buys a crappy new PC that is nevertheless far better.

Smart Boot Manager lets you boot itself from floppy (as well as CD-ROM, hard disk, etc.). It then lets you continue the boot process from whatever media you wish. It's perfect for those computers that can't boot from their own CD drive: you boot SmartBtMgr from a floppy, then transfer the boot process to your Knoppix CD. With it, you would no longer need to carry a separate boot floppy for each Knoppix or other bootable CD.

If I recall, the download is a program that generates the correct boot image on your specified medium, whether floppy, CD-R, etc. SmartBtMgr can be set to autoboot (eg. if you know you want to boot from the CD each time) and can protect any boot choices with a password. You could boot from your CD drive (let's say) and then choose which of your 23 bazillion SCSI/USB/SATA drives you want to boot from.

Note that Smart Boot Manager is not a replacement for Linux loaders such as LILO, since it is merely a boot program and not a kernel loader. To combine them, presumably you would install SmartBtMgr on the Master Boot Record of your hard drive, then install LILO on that particular partition that contains Linux, but I haven't tried this before.

You can find Smart Boot Manager here:
http://btmgr.webframe.org/index.php3?body=about.ht ml

Let me know next time you need a floppy disk.