emosun wrote:

when using a boot disk like a windows 98 bootdisk , can this allow me to BOOT from the cd drive or will it only allow me to have access to it?

Only access it. Look up PLOP boot loader. It allows you you to boot off off bootable cds on systems without that feature. A 486 for example.

Jorpho wrote:

If I'm not mistaken, that still requires particular BIOS features (i.e. the 1995 El Torito spec) that might be missing on a 486.

When I think of it, I never tried to boot off CD-ROM on a 486. It did work on P166 MMX and Athlon 1200 PCs without problem.

If you have a way of writing physical floppies from a computer that can browse the internet, I would recommend the "all in one" bootdisk by Michael Schierl. I have used the "smart boot manager" from that disk and successfully booted various Linux distros and even Win XP on any computer that would'nt do it otherwise. As long as you have the ATAPI cdrom connected as a slave to the harddrive, and the harddrive doesn't get confused by this. I have had some trouble with drives that are jumpered "stand alone" or "master with slave present".