Help me make a bootable hard disk

[Dangermouse]

Its also possible to make a small partition on the drive like windows recovery partition and boot and install from that, which i have done in the past with fedora dvd.

[glennzo]

[root@phenom14 i386-redhat># dd if=stage1 of=/dev/sdb bs=512 count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
512 bytes (512 B) copied, 0.00598108 s, 85.6 kB/s

[root@phenom14 i386-redhat># dd if=stage2 of=/dev/sdb bs=512 seek=1
239+1 records in
239+1 records out
122776 bytes (123 kB) copied, 0.0163128 s, 7.5 MB/s

Install the drive into the old laptop and boot. I see

grub>_

Now I've got to see what my son wants to do with this thing. He's mentioned the Chrome OS but that hasn't been released to the public yet, as far as I can tell, unless you want source, an installed Linux system and a lot of patience.

Off to play with something else for the time being.

[glennzo]

OK. Well, I won this battle but I'm still fighting the war. I've gotten this old laptop to boot and have managed to get Puppy Linux running on it. Runs really well too!

I created 2 partitions on the disk, one 500MB and one about 37GB. I then recursively copied my /boot folder to the hard disk 37GB partition. Then I ran grub and ran set up (hd1,0). That got the thing booting but of course all I could do do was look at the pretty boot menu. Obviously it wasn't going to boot any of the selections, but at least it boots. Then I found myself a tutorial on installing and ISO from a hard disk. Followed that including copying the ISO to the smaller partition, mounting the ISO and copying some files, then editing my boot menu and Puppy sprang to life. I surfed the 'net for a few minutes and checked out some of the other offerings, so the battle is won and I now know how to do this for Linux. I still need to figure out how to do this for DOS/Windows, which I believe that I can do now that my son bought and adapter that allows us to attach the drive to the IDE bus. My previous DOS attempts failed due to the fact that the USB drive just wasn't seen so I couldn't copy system boot files to it. If we can do that (attach to IDE bus) then we can get DOS and Windows installed. I fear though, that any Windows offering is either going to be too old for modern usage or too new for this ancient hardware.