booting from USB on old machine without USB boot support

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2009-05-30 at 16:48 -0400, fred smith wrote:
> I'm playing around with F11 pre-release, and wanted to install from the
> DVD on an old PII I have here. trouble is I don't have a spare (working)
> DVD drive, but I do have a USB DVD drive. 
> 
> This machine is old enough it won't boot from the USB DVD, so I was
> wondering if there is a way to make a bootable CD from the DVD, and
> use that bootable CD as we used to use boot floppies, back in the day,
> to boot the system far enough to allow access to the DVD and to then
> run the installation from the DVD.
> 
> Anybody know?

You could just install from a Live CD (I presume the machine has a CD
drive). Once that's up, you should be able to install extra stuff from
the DVD via the USB drive. In fact it's not hard to just configure the
drive as a local repo so yum will consult it when updating (or just copy
the DVD contents to your hard disk and do it from there if you have the
space).

poc