To boot the installation system, you have the following choices: bootable CD-ROM, floppies, or a non-Linux boot loader.
CD-ROM booting is one of the easiest ways to install. Not all machines can boot directly from the CD-ROM so you may still need to use floppies. Booting from floppies is supported for most platforms. Floppy booting is described in section 2.4.2 on page [*].
2.4.1 Installing from a CD-ROM
If your system supports booting from a CD-ROM, you don’t need any floppies. Put the CD-ROM into the drive, turn your computer off, and then turn it back on. You should see a Welcome screen with a boot prompt at the bottom. Now you can skip down to section 2.5.
If your computer didn’t “see” the Debian CD-ROM, the easiest option is to make two floppies for booting (described in section 2.4.2) and then use them to start Debian. Don’t worry; after Debian is finished with those two floppies, it will find your CD-ROM with no trouble.
2.4.2 Booting from Floppies
It’s not hard at all to boot from floppies. In fact, your CD-ROM contains all the information necessary to create boot disks for you. For these instructions, you will need to get two disks. Label the first one “Debian 2.1 Install/Rescue Disk” and the second “Debian 2.1 Modules/Drivers Disk.”
Creating Floppies from Disk Images
Disk images are files containing the complete contents of a floppy disk in raw form. Disk images, such as resc1440.bin, cannot simply be copied to floppy drives. A special program is used to write the image files to floppy disk in raw mode.
First, you need to get to a DOS prompt. In Windows 95 and above, you can do this by double-clicking on an MS-DOS icon or by going to Start\( \rightarrow \)Programs\( \rightarrow \)MS-DOS prompt. Then, insert your Debian GNU/Linux CD-ROM into your CD-ROM drive. First, you change to your CD-ROM drive. In most cases, this is D:.