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Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Help & support for Ultimate Edition 2.3


Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Postby niceguy1 » Wed Jun 16, 2010 4:07 am

I KNOW I'm asking for trouble posting this on a forum for an old version, but you'll see why in a moment. Sorry this is so long, but I want to make sure I include every pertinent detail.

Here's the thing: I want to install Ultimate Edition, any version, on a somewhat older laptop, a Panasonic Toughbook. It's equipped with a CD-ROM drive and a 3.5 Floppy drive. I have successfully installed Ubuntu 10.04 - the most recent as far as I can tell - and it seems to be running fine. But I want some version of Ultimate Edition, at least to give it a shot, preferably 2.6 Gamers (as the most recent Gamers).

Now as I'm sure everybody knows, Ultimate Edition images are always DVD images, but this laptop does not HAVE a DVD drive, at least not built in. I have an external DVD drive to connect via USB, but the bios doesn't support booting from anything connected by USB. Hard drive, CD or Floppy are the only options.

Now, I've burnt several versions of Ultimate Edition since I was converted, so I have a few discs to choose from. All of them have a folder called Install, whose Readme file says the following:

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.


Sounds perfect! Not sure if it'll support booting from a USB DVD drive, but I'll give it a shot! But I don't have any machine running DOS so I can't try rawrite, and I'm finding very little information on how to use dd, specifically how to specify to unpack the bin file and "burn" it to a disk. I tried "dd --help", but I don't see any Destination option. As far as I can tell, this smb.bin file is the floppy version of an ISO, it's a floppy image. Although I have a few computers at my disposal, including a desktop dual booting Windows Vista and Ultimate Edition 2.3 Gamers, and several Live Bootable discs of Ultimate Edition, since this Toughbook is the only computer with a floppy drive, it's the only computer which can make this magical disk. So all that matters is what systems I can get on it and what they can do. Oh, and the Toughbook doesn't have wireless networking, so I can't connect to my home network to connect to the Internet, at least not easily... If necessary I can awkwardly work where I have my router.

Now, poking around these forums to try to get the info I need, I came across one thread saying that Ubuntu 9.10 and up - so presumably also Ultimate Edition 2.4 and up - does not see or mount floppy drives! Since I couldn't find any way to get Ubuntu 10.04 to mount the disc drive, this explains the other problem I had. Hence, this forum. I figure 2.3 is my limit (which is funny, since it was the current version when I started using Ultimate Edition), since it's based on 9.04. Assuming I want to be able to still use the floppy drive, which since it's there I do.

The thing is, nothing in any Ubuntu or Ultimate Edition I've tried even recognizes the BIN extension! Everything else I can think of involves trying a CD/DVD burning software to try to find one which supports BIN, but I'm sure they won't even have the option to set the floppy as the destination. So making this disc using a graphical interface seems out of the question. All that's left to me is the command line, I just need to know how to write the command. There are no examples in the help text to help me figure it out. Oh, and later on in the Readme file mentions the command bmconf to somehow use SBM, but I also find no info on how to use that, either.

Note that although I'm full of questions here, I'm quite the computer expert usually, and I've been using computers heavily since the DOS days, and I've been missing DOS for quite some time. :) So, I'm comfortable with trying to fool around in Terminal. I'm just still somewhat new to Ubuntu/Linux, especially the more advanced commands and such.

Obviously the first step is to install Ubuntu 9.04 over my Ubuntu 10.04 (or rather, to burn the install CD first, THEN install), but after that.... Can anybody help please? Searching these forums for "sbm.bin" and "floppy" come up with nothing when I'm logged in, and little but nothing useful when I wasn't (which is weird, I'd understand the reverse, threads not available to unregistered users). Thanks in advance!
niceguy1
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Re: Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Postby Admin-Amir » Wed Jun 16, 2010 4:49 am

Hello niceguy1 and welcome to the U.E Forum.

Nice book you have here :D

OK lets try to do the process as simple that we can.
You have working U.E there right ,then you can use the U.E to do the job for you - HOW?
install from Synaptic the packages of UNetbootin +language pack .
Then you can Extract the ISO image to your Flash Drive as A system and not as ISO.
Then you can plug in the Flash Drive to your machine and start the U.E 2.7 on the problematic machine.
This will solve your issue with the how to have the U.E 2.7 to work for you.
Good luck.
Admin-Amir
 



Re: Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Postby niceguy1 » Wed Jun 16, 2010 5:12 am

Thanks for the reply! LOL re: book, yeah, I know. :)

Ah, perhaps I should clarify 2 things, in case they weren't clear. 1) The computer I'm on right now is NOT the Toughbook I'm talking about, that computer has no access to the internet to download and install anything and 2) I'm talking about a DVD drive connecting through USB, not a Flash drive. I have no Flash drive (USB Key) large enough to install a running copy of Ultimate Edition, I only have a 1GB and 2GB key. I actually tried that too, I found a command the other day (I think in Ultimate Edition 2.4) called something like "Install on USB drive" or something, with a friend's 4GB USB Key, but it kept insisting I had to format it to use it, even after I told it to go ahead and format. Even with non-Gamers images that were only like 2GB.

Then there's the other issue. Even if I got a working bootable USB key, as I said this computer can't boot from USB, at least not by itself. I need to get this SBM thing working to have a shot at booting from my DVD drive OR a USB key! As in, anything plugged in via USB. Another solution would be if I could trigger installation from within Ubuntu, but everything including the Ultimate Edition discs says that to install I have to boot off the disc.
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Re: Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Postby Admin-Amir » Fri Jun 18, 2010 5:22 am

Hello niceguy1.

did you have install on the other machine the samba packages?
there are 3-4 packages that you need for to make the share option.
and you need to share the modem to the other machine with the working machine.
when you make the share for the USB,or in other option that you want,
you need to insert the port numbers,what kind of share it will be and so on.
And you need to log in to your modem/router and to allow the connection to the machine.
So the process have to be like that:
1- install the samba packages.
2- configure the share on the samba to the other machine and permissions.
3- log in to the modem/router and allow there the connection to the other machine.
4- there is one more option that I can think about and that will be to share your Desktop to the other machine,
and the wireless as well.
Admin-Amir
 



Re: Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Postby niceguy1 » Tue Jun 22, 2010 4:06 pm

I don't know why you're going on and on about sharing and installing packages to share, I'm not trying to share anything, I'm just trying to install Ultimate Edition on a computer without an internal DVD drive. The SBM.BIN file on the install DVD seems like exactly what I need, I just want to know how to apply it to a floppy disk.
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Re: Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Postby JOHNNYG » Tue Jun 22, 2010 5:11 pm

try this ! 1. Find the file entitled sbm.bin, or if you have Breezy or earlier, sbootmgr.dsk under the install directory of the Ubuntu installation CD or it should be on the USB flash drive. If you do not have one on hand, you can download the boot manager from its official site
2. Insert a blank floppy disk formatted for Windows into the floppy drive. If you have a USB floppy drive, then you will need to find the device name first and use it in place of /dev/fd0 throughout the rest of this tutorial. On KDE, you can find this by hovering over the mounted floppy drive on the desktop. The field marked Device Node is what you need.
3. Go to a terminal and cd into the directory where you have the smart boot manager.
4. Insert the command below. If you did not get the boot manager from a current Ubuntu CD, replace sbm.bin with the correct name. Also make sure that /dev/fd0 is the correct device name. It should be on most internal floppy drives.
dd if=sbm.bin of=/dev/fd0
Now you can insert both the floppy disk and the CD into the computer and reboot. Make sure your computer is set to boot from the floppy drive though. You should then get a menu where you can select to boot the USB device and you're then done!
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Re: Can anyone help me figure out how to use sbm.bin?

Postby niceguy1 » Fri Jul 02, 2010 3:41 pm

Thank you! THAT is the reply I was looking for... The friend took the laptop back, so I can't try this right now, but now I can let him know we can give it another shot. Thanks again!
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