Toshiba Satellite 2400 (Pentium 4, FDD, DVD, 1024x768)

[Grunchy]

Laptop is from 2002 or so, 512MB ram, 149GB PATA. I consider it the perfect DOS/Win9x/WinXP machine & even works well with Linux.

My plan is to multi-boot "Dos6 + Win3.1" from primary 1 (2GB), "Win95" from primary 2 (10GB), "Win98" from primary 3 (10GB), "Kolibri OS" from logical 1 (2GB), "WinXP" from logical 2 (40GB), "Lubuntu 16.04" from logical 3 (83GB + 2GB swap).

Plop V5 working with Linux doesn't make any sense to me. We have this warning, "Warning Linux users: Install LILO or GRUB to the boot sector of your Linux instead of the Master Boot Record (MBR). The Plop Boot Manager is not a Linux loader and cannot start Linux without LILO, GRUB, Syslinux and similar!  See Linux Boot Managers."

And of course if you click "Linux Boot Managers" all you get is a cryptic message, "LILO, GRUB / grub4dos, GRUB2: I had no time to write some short descriptions how to install them to the boot sector."   <-- I DIDN'T FIND THIS INFO VERY USEFUL TO ME.


Well the laptop did work with Plop V5 (for DOS and Win9x), though I could never figure out how to boot Linux/Lubuntu with it.


So then I thought, perhaps I can boot Linux with PBM6? But when I try to boot up PBM6 from floppy disk it comes to a screen and "freezes" (no response from keyboard or mouse).

It says:

Hard disk     [IDE, PM, P1] >
CD/DVD drive  [IDE, SM] >
Floppy drive  [FDC, 1] >

Viewer, File Commander
Setup
About
Shutdown

This is the 12/02/2024 version, I also tried the latest "pbm6-20240301.zip" and got the same result.

Maybe I don't need such a fancy bootloader as PBM6, perhaps Plop V5 is good enough for this older Laptop.
But then, is there any possible way to write an instruction or perhaps sequence of events for configuring Plop to work with Linux?

One imagines someone at some time was able to achieve this, perhaps a "how to do it" for the next guy.