Old 486 computer & external CD reader advice needed

[Justin Zygmont]

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006, Thomas Taylor wrote:

> On Wednesday 01 February 2006 00:25, Rickey Moore wrote:
>> Thomas Taylor <linxt at comcast.net> wrote: Hi All:
>>
>> The bus
>> structure is ISA with room for two cards.
>>
>> not sure if it would work as the BIOS doesn't allow booting from anything
>> except the floppy or hard drive.
>> How about installing to an old cast-off HD on another machine, and then
>> transfering that drive to this machine? Good ole 486 ought to run faster
>> with Linux on it than Winblows. I used a 486/66 with 16 megs of memory to
>> service 4 modems, two 8 serial port dickens terminal servers which had a
>> collection of terminals, XT's and 286's running procomm. One day I had
>> about 12 users on the terminals and all 4 modems lit up with users, all
>> playing in nightmare mud OS, and running editors, and I cranked up Doom II
>> on the server. It was slow as heck, but the fact that it ran at all was
>> pretty great! Enjoy dinking around with it!
>>
>> The harddrive install ought to work... Ric
>>
>>>>>> snip <<<<<
>
> Thanks to all you guys who replied.  Some good suggestions that I will play
> with as time allows and get back with the results when I have any.

I've tried this before, and that was about the only way to do it. 
However, running with the wrong arch kernel, glibc, etc may pose a 
problem.  I couldn't do it with FC3 with i686 to i586, everything would 
segfault.