NASLite Network Attached Storage

I have an old Packard Bell Multimedia D141, a Pentium I 133 with 32megs of RAM. I have tried several different Linux Live-CD distros on it, and most of them would NOT boot on it! They would all give an error saying that they could not find the CD-ROM drive, or something of the sort. This is even though the distro was booting from the CD-ROM disk!

Apparently this was one of those cases where the CD-ROM driver ON the CD would work on 99.997% of the machines out there, but where mine was in that .003% that were incompatible with the included driver...

Knoppix would not boot, DLS (Damn Small Linux) would not boot, Ubuntu would not boot... Redmund Linux (the distro which was later renamed to Licoris), however, DID boot from the CD...

I eventually got hold of a boot-floppy for DSL that DID let me boot from the CD-ROM disk. It would start from the floppy, and then the floppy would hand off control to the CD-ROM drive (with the DSL CD in it) using a slightly different driver than the one actually ON the DSL Live-CD.

I actually went ahead and installed DSL onto the tiny hard drive on that machine, but because the color scheme was way off for some reason, I wasn't entirely satisfied with it. I actually wanted to have Knoppix on there instead, though, because it looked much nicer and had more stuff on it...

I later tried a boot-from-floppy scheme (which involved TWO floppies inserted one after the other) for that Knoppix Live-CD, but I couldn't get that one to boot successfully...

However, obviously there IS a way to boot from floppy with a more-capable CD-ROM driver and then hand off control to boot the machine from the CD-ROM...

I have since decided that this machine would be MUCH more useful to me as a network-accessible drive. The size and shape of the machine is perfect, and I have now gotten a nice 80gig hard drive for it...

Well... now the biiiiiig question: What do I do if I can't get the NASLite+ CD to boot on this machine? Is there a boot-floppy available, with a different CD-ROM driver on it, that will then hand-off control to the CD-ROM drive so that NASLite+ will successfully boot?

Does anyone else have NASLite+ running on this same machine? Please tell me you do...

I don't really want to buy the CD image only to discover I can't use it on this machine...

The first thing to consider is "Does any CD-ROM boot on that machine". If the answer is yes, then NASLite+ will probably work since it does not need a CD-ROM driver in order to access the CD. The boot process is completely BIOS driven, so in theory, if you can boot a CD, NASLite should work.

Okay, but in the case of those Linux Live-CDs, the OS contained on the CD (and that was launching itself from "inside" the CD) needed a CD-ROM driver internally to interact with the CD-ROM drive... and evidently there must be something slightly different enough about this CD-ROM drive that the driver that came imbedded with the OS on that CD did not know how to interract with that particular CD-ROM drive.

Basically what I'm asking then is: If it turns out that the NASLite+ "does not like" this particular CD-ROM drive, is there a way around the problem that you guys can provide me on s timely basis? That is, could there be devised a floppy-based boot process that gives a different CD-ROM driver, or would it be possible to create for me a patched version of the NASLite+ CD that is optimised for that CD-ROM drive or machine?

-- Addendum:

Okay, I guess some clarification is in order. Each of these different Live-CDs do in fact boot on this machine, they just don't get very far once they start into their launching sequence. The error message I get, in which the thing complains that it can't find the CD-ROM drive, is clearly generated by the Linux distro. That is to say, the program that generates the error message itself loaded from the CD!

In most CD-based distributions the kernel boots via BIOS calls, after which it takes over. Once that occurs the appropriate Linux driver for your Interface/CD-ROM hardware is required to access the remainder of the OS from the CD-ROM media.

I suspect that you don't have an ATAPI CD-ROM, but rather one accessed through a legacy board of some sort.

The NASLite kernel does not access the CD-ROM. Both it and the root filesystem load into memory using BIOS calls, after which it no longer needs access to the CD-ROM.

That is why, in theory, NASLite+ can boot from any BIOS bootable CD-ROM - USB, SCSI, IDE, Firewire or any other Legacy board that the BIOS is designed to get at...