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Sindi Keesan wrote

> We have a 386 with working floppy but dead HD which I could
> conceivably use to run BL3 from parport zip drive, with 4MB RAM and serial
> port (for external modem).

> Sindi Keesan

David Moberg's floppy disk with parport zip drive support (scsi_mod and 
sd_mod built in) uses grub.  On my pentium, it boots right to the zip disk 
50MB linux (BL3) (which I am using right now).  On the 386 without math 
coprocessor (empty socket), I get a boot menu (blzip is the only thing on 
it) with a message to use up and down arrows to choose what filesystem to 
boot to, then I hit Enter, and I am told 'Error 16: Inconsistent 
filesystem' and I can go into grub and give it commands, but not boot BL.

So this 386 will not boot with grub (or does not like zip drives?).

BL3 floppy disk (lilo) starts to boot (as far as 'compressed image found') 
but of course it runs out of memory (4MB total).  I have not tried David's 
USB syslinux floppy.  Lilo works on far more machines than grub or 
syslinux or whatever the newer live CDs use.  Even a 2.4GHz DELL would not 
boot live Knoppix (or DSL?).  BL3 floppy has worked on everything that 
works with DOS.