I have an old Pentium 133 system from around 1996 ish.

It doesn't boot from CD. In fact, the CDROM drive doesn't show up in the BIOS. (It shows up in Windows/DOS after the appropriate drivers are loaded).

Is there anyway to get this machine to boot from a CD?

I have tried PLoP boot loader and Smart Boot Manager, both loaded from floppy disks, but neither recognise the CDROM drive. Not sure whether I'm missing any options to get these to recognise the CDROM drive, so but far I haven't found anything.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
Steve
[Reply]

I know windows 95 needed a boot floppy which then loaded generic drivers for a CD rom (same Era) so you could install windows, so maybe worth hunting around for the W95 boot floppy image and then simply editing the path in the image to run the startup.exe or whatever it is called?

You could try to update the Bios for the specific manufacturer website as an updated version may include support for CD based booting, worth a shot.

search for bootdisk on google, the top result may be of use.
[Reply]

I suspect such an old motherboard didn't support CD drives at all, which is why drivers needed loading before it would recognise it in the OS. You could find a PCI IDE card that has its own BIOS to boot from CD built in.
[Reply]

It already has Windows 95 installed which was booted from a floppy. That is nice and easy for Windows, but not so much for Linux and Live CDs.
[Reply]