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I have an old server that has no CD-ROM, will not boot from USB, and I cannot access the iLOM console. Thus, it appears that my only means of installing an OS is to boot from floppy, then configure the network adapter and install the rest over the internet.

I found this page with instructions on how to do this, but the links to the floppy images are broken: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/WithFloppies

I tried finding floppy images, but the best I could come up with was Debian Etch, which is quite old. Furthermore, those were i386 kernels only, and I want to install a 64-bit kernel.

Bottom line: How can I install a current, Intel 64-bit linux OS with only a 3.5" floppy drive to start with and no CD-ROM whatsoever? (I am looking to install Ubuntu 14.04 Lts)

DnrDevil
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BillBraskey
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    Sadly it seems that floppy images are no longer made. Maybe booting from the network through PXE? – fkraiem Jan 24 '16 at 10:57
  • I was hoping to avoid this, as I would have quite a lot of studying to do on both setting up a boot server and accessing the target machine through its very old and no-longer-supported LOM interface. The network adapter is a 1000-Base-SX fiber device that is not configured by the BIOS, so simple PXE booting is not feasible. – BillBraskey Jan 25 '16 at 02:53
  • Another possibility would be to connect the hard drive to another computer, install using debootstrap, and put it back in the old machine. https://www.debian.org/releases/jessie/i386/apds03.html.en – fkraiem Jan 25 '16 at 02:57
  • Ah, but the hard drives are U320 SCSI and I don't have another computer with that interface. I'm a glutton for punishment, hehe. – BillBraskey Jan 25 '16 at 04:12
  • This is verging on new-thread territory, but what about booting with an old edition bootdisk, then performing an internet install to a current distro/version? I have some SuSE 7.0 bootdisks here. But I don't want to be forced to install SuSE. Can I use that to set up the hardware, partition the disk, then bootstrap to install Debian or Lubuntu? If so, can I boot the i386 kernel from the floppy but install the x64 kernel? If not, could I un-RAID the drives, install anything on one, then use that to install my final OS on the other drive, then rebuild the array? – BillBraskey Jan 25 '16 at 04:18
  • If the SuSE disks can give you a shell which you can use to access the hard drive, yes, you can do a debootstrap install from there. – fkraiem Jan 25 '16 at 04:22
  • Also, I suppose you can still create floppy images using whatever method was used before, but you would need to ask on the Debian mailing lists or some other venue frequented by very experienced Debian users to find out what the method is. – fkraiem Jan 25 '16 at 04:24
  • Sorry, no, you cannot debotstrap a 64-bit system from a 32-bit one, as the installation environment must be able to run binaries of the target system. – fkraiem Jan 25 '16 at 04:30
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    can you access the disk? what OS is on it now? If -linux- and you have grub: you can install from disk too by creating a 1.1Gb partition, store the ISO you downloaded and point grub to boot from that ISO. – Rinzwind Jan 25 '16 at 10:54
  • @Rinzwind: The disks are blank. I can access them from a DOS boot floppy, but that's not very productive. – BillBraskey Jan 26 '16 at 05:39
  • Relevant: 1) https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation#Installation_without_a_CD 2) https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PXEInstallServer – David Foerster Feb 06 '16 at 02:19
  • You should narrow the question down to Ubuntu if you want to keep it open: this is Ask Ubuntu, and asking about other Linux distributions is off-topic. – kos Feb 07 '16 at 07:53
  • http://askubuntu.com/questions/484434/install-ubuntu-without-cd-and-usb-how. May be of some use. – DnrDevil Feb 14 '16 at 11:43
  • If your server is that old, are you sure it can even run Ubuntu? – SuperSluether Feb 14 '16 at 21:04

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