About the Smart Boot Manager image ---------------------------------- The file `sbm.bin' that is available in this directory may be useful to you if you are not able to directly boot the first CD because your BIOS may be too old and may not support ISOLINUX. Then, instead of booting on the CD directly, you create a Smart Boot Manager floppy image by using the sbm.bin disk image. You can create this floppy with rawrite (under DOS) or with dd (under Linux). Now you can boot on this floppy disk and it will detect your CDROM and let you boot on it bypassing any BIOS limitation. What is SBM ? Smart Boot Manager or briefly SmartBtmgr (SBM), is an OS independent Boot Manager - a program that is loaded by the bios before any operating system and allows you to choose which operating system to boot. SBM is included in Debian in two ways, the package bmconf allows us to install and configure an old version of SBM and sbm wich is the latest version of SBM with an installer. What's the use of SBM on the CD then ? SBM includes an IDE driver that allows us to boot the cds even on machines with a BIOS that wouldn't support booting from CD, provided our CDROM is an IDE one, that is, so you can make a SBM floppy and boot from it and then tell it to boot from your CDROM. Also, there are some cases where the BIOS would allow booting from the CD but isolinux fails to boot from there, in this case you can either boot using a CD other than the first, as the others don't use isolinux, or you can make a SBM floppy and boot from this floppy and then tell SBM to boot your CDROM. How do you make a SBM floppy ? If you have SBM installed on a box you can run sbminst. Otherwise you can put the sbm.bin floppy image that we provide with our cds onto a floppy just like you would do with a rescue image.