At 04:23 PM 1/20/98 -0800, you wrote:
>
>An (anonymized) reply I received via personal email said:
>
>>> Am I missing something obvious?
>>A CD-ROM, like a ZIP drive are easier to move arround ;-)
>
>
>Yes, you can move the little silver disk, and you can move an external
>CD-rom drive.  But from what I know, most DECstations don't have
>bootable (DEC) CD-rom drives. So you're left with the install media on
>a mountable, _but not bootable_ media.
>
>If you've got a bare machine that's no improvement, and if you have a
>machine with some other OS (e.g. Ultrix), you can put the install
>materials on the existing drive (e.g., dd the diskimage into the
>Ultrix swap space.) So how does having a CD help?
>
>I'm willing to beleive that having a CD which is non-bootable for the
>majority of installers would help.  But I'd appreciate knowing *how*
>it helps, because that might just let us make the install process
>easier, even without the CD.
>
>Now, if many people (or even just most of the people asking for CDs)
>actually have CD drives that are bootable (i.e., can be set to
>512-byte blocks), that's an entirely different kettle of fish....
>
>So, who does, and who doesn't, have a bootable  CD-rom drive?
>
>

Jonathan:

I have a RRD42 and a SCSI floppy drive on my DS3100. What I don't have is
any working OS to boot the machine in the first place. I only have the
standalone DS3100. A small network with my Win95 machines is planned for
the future, but I need the hardware first. My Win95 machines are IDE only,
so building any kind of disk on them is out. The only access I have
currently to the Internet, to get the install kernel, is the Win95
machines. No modem on the DS3100, if I could boot it.

A bootable CD would allow me to get my system working in the first place,
and finally be able to use it.

Steven Underwood
Steven P. Underwood,DNRC
Whitinsville,MA
StevenU@POBoxes.com