No bootable CD for installation

[g.willis]

OK, just discovered ReactOS and am wondering if there's some way I can install it on an old laptop that's otherwise collecting dust.
The laptop in question is a Dell Latitude XPi. It has an internal floppy & HD, an, external CD (which can't be booted from) and no USB ports. Is there someway that ReactOS can be installed on this computer? Can the CD iso file be copied the the HD and a boot floppy set up?

[gabrielilardi]

Hi, there are several ways to try that, pick the hd and connect it to a pc with a cable adapter and install ros to it, you just do the installation until the first reboot then shut it down and reconnect the hd to the laptop, another way could be dump a reactos installation with some mirroring software (like Norton Ghost). etc. The hd should be empty or have at maximum one fat32 formatted partition. Floppy support is broken atm.

[GoBusto]

I found a neat little utility a while ago when I was trying to install ReactOS on an old tower which could not boot from CD. It booted from a floppy disk and presented the user with a list of available drives, so you could boot from the floppy drive and then continue on with the CD drive.

Unfortunately, I cannot recall what the name of the program was. I'll have a look around to see if I can find it again.

EDIT: I think that this is it: Smart Boot Manager. You'll need a tool that allows you to write floppy disk images to physical media. I did this using MacOSX, which has this functionality built in, but if you're using Windows then you will need a third party tool. I've heard good things about RawWrite, so you might want to give that a try.

[hto]

You can also use GRUB bootloader. ReactOS' FreeLoader (freeldr.sys) is a multiboot-compliant "kernel", i.e. it can be loaded with GRUB.

GRUB can be installed on the hard disk or floppy.

[SdC]

Interesting issue, that eventually must be solved. I personally would love to see ReactOS boot from the network (boot rom in NIC, tftp the image) a la MS Remote Installation Service/Windows Deployment server or Ghost. I'm convinced this could be achieved with open source tools and very few modifications to the code, and a do-able sub project I'm willing to embark on. Such a feature could help to considerably speed up testing on real hardware as well, and help save the planet (fewer burnt CD's with all those builds)