allright, this is an _old_ computer i'm fixing up, and it can't boot; its hd was wrecked by a virus. since i can't find any of the old disks to get this thing to work i've been having to piece together a boot disk (floppy), and since i can't put windows on i'm putting fedora core 4 on. the problem is that i'm new to linux and can't get the installation to start from my dos prompt. this system's bios does not support booting from cd, only from floppy, so if its not possible to start the installation from a dos prompt the only thing i can think of would be to write the boot process for a cd-rom into autoexec.bat, but i dont know how to do that either. ive also tried loading up trinux, but that wasn't able to detect my cd-rom

Try making a Smart Boot Manager boot floppy. I use them to allow booting from CD drives. Also, I burn my install CDs at the lowest speed possible so old CD drives can read them. By the way, I suggest trying a light distro such as Damn Small Linux on such a machine, and using xfce or BlackBox as a window manager. KDE will choke on hardware that old. A very easy way to install Debian on it would be to use a Kanotix live CD, and you could boot with it first to detect all your hardware.

Most distros include a directory on the first CD containing floppy images which you can write to a disc and use to start installation....