Booting from a UDF DVD in an old machine

I have an old Dell Dimension 4100 (PIII/933 512 MB RAM) I want to primarily turn into a file/print server. I want to re-install the O/S, but the disc I'm installing from has a file that's over 2 GB in size, so it has to be a UDF disc.

I can boot the 4100 from a Knoppix CD or DVD. I had no trouble in getting the BIOS set up to try to boot from the DVD first. If I boot to XP (on the hard drive) and pop in the DVD, it sees it, recognizes it as a UDF disc, and I can read the files on it just fine -- I just can't boot from it.

So, since XP can read from it, and I can boot from the drive (albeit with another disc), it would seem that the problem must be that the BIOS doesn't know how to boot from a *UDF* DVD.

A) Can anyone else confirm whether or not they can boot from a UDF DVD on a Dell Dimension 4100

B) Any suggestions on how I can get this to work?

I tried a USB flash drive (I've added a USB+Firewire card inside), but there's no option for booting from a USB drive.

I tried just running setup.exe from the disc, and it says that it's not a valid win32 app (I'm installing a 64-bit O/S on top of my old XP Pro/32).

 

Hello,
I have an old computer that will not boot from USB but I used Plop Boot manager on a bootable CD and I can boot from the USB no problem. Maybe it can help you.

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

 

Looks just like what I need. I'll give it a shot and then post back and let you know how it goes. THANKS!

 

Well, it was a nice try, but plop boot didn't allow be to boot from the UDF dvd, either. I was trying to install Win 7/64 on a system currently running XP Pro/32. I couldn't boot the install DVD, even though XP would read it just fine.

I also tried gujin, but that seemed to be more of a linux kind of tool. I didn't mess around with it long, but it didn't seem to be going anywhere that looked like it would work for me, so I just gave up on the boot-from-udf-media thing.

I figured I could just run from the DVD directly, but when I tried to just run install.exe, it said it wasn't a valud win32 app (of course).

So, I just scaled back my expectations, and I'm installing Win 7/32. That seems to be working just fine -- I didn't have to boot from the disc to do that. This will be just fine.

Thanks to all who responded for the assistance