On Sun, 23 Jul 2000, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

> I have a laptop (an IBM Thinkpad 760ED) in which there can be either
> a floppy drive or a CD-ROM drive and which is incapable of booting
> from CD-ROM (stupidity in the BIOS). 

The 76x series came with a plastic box which enabled you to attach your
floppy drive externally. That was how I got my 1.4.1 installed but I
suppose you haven't got that gadget handy anymore?

> Thus, I'd like to boot from a
> floppy and be able to perform an ftp install... but I can't do that
> unless the boot floppy configures the PCMCIA ethernet card I have
> available, which even the 1.5_ALPHA snapshot's floppy doesn't seem
> able to, which is pretty silly considering how old this card is. I
> also have *no* other i386 machines available to build a boot floppy
> with the proper PCMCIA support

The install floppy usually configures PCMCIA correctly on 76x as you can
see from the lines below (pcic0: controller 1 will have sockets when
docked (with the proper dock :-)))

> pcic0 at isa0 port 0x3e0-0x3e1 iomem 0xd0000 - 0xd3fff
> pcic0: controller 0 (Intel 82365SL Revision 1) has sockets A and B
> pcic0: controller 1 (Intel 82365SL Revision 1) has no sockets

> Xircom, CreditCard 10Base-T, CE-10BC, 2.0/0008012302-011494 (manufacturer 0x0105, product 0x0108) function 0 not configured

It seems that the Xircom card is not supported. Wether it is easy to get
it working I am not the one to say but I'd suppose it could be handled 
as a standard ne2000 clone.

> I'd still like to get that PCMCIA card to work, though...

Your PCMCIA seems to be running OK so it might be worth borrowing another
card somewhere. When I had my 765L I was using a _very_ cheap D-Link DE-650
which worked "out of the box" as I remember.

> Any suggestions and help will be much appreciated...

This was just my "real life" experience. Hopefully someone not so clueless
can help you either getting the Xircom running or how to manually prep the
disk.
-- 
Kind Regards,
Claus Andersen