SCO

Need to make an Installation CD, from a SCO UW 2.1.3 disk. I have to use this ver. of SCO and need to get it on a new Dell Optiplex PC with out a floppy drive.

I have several 2.1.3 machines loaded, but these are about 6 year old PCs. I have 1 loaded with 7.1.4. I have even thought about coping the disk on the 2.1.3 PC and coping to the 7.1.4 to the burn to CD. But no luck getting the disk to copy.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
NC user

Floppy emulation is part of the spec for bootable CDROMs, so if you have mkisofs and can image one of your SCO boot floppies, you could do this:

Making a bootable CD from a bootable floppy image

That might be able to boot the first floppy. You wouldn't be able to read in successive floppies that way. If the first floppy is enough to get CDROM support going, you might be able to cram the rest of the files just into the ISO image -- the files would show up seperately, the first floppy in A:, the rest accessed by however SCO usually accesses CDROM drives.

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

You could also dump it raw -- completely raw, no partition table -- onto a USB flash drive. Many systems will boot raw floppy images found on USB sticks. (the ONLY way a few nasty systems will boot USB sticks, grrr!)

---------- Post updated at 02:45 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:41 PM ----------

Also, look deeply into that computer's CMOS for legacy disk options and the like. An OS old enough to be on floppy might need BIOS interfaces that are depreciated these days.

Alternatively, find a machine that has a floppy drive, and I assume a SATA disk controller, then remove the disk from the new Dell machine, and install the OS in the normal way on the temporary machine, then re-install the drive in the new machine.