[NTLUG:Discuss] boot diskette problem

[Kyle Davenport]

Hoping someone here has a clue.

I have made 6 different boot diskettes ( with my own kernel, no initrd,
etc, I don't use mkbootdisk; I just dd if=bzImage of=/dev/fd0 ).   Each of
these and also Redhat8's recovery boot disk, pretend they are loading
(several lines of dots) and then go into an infinite loop of
AX/BX/CX/DX's.  Redhat's boot diskette boot's into an unmodified install
on an ext3 ide drive.  My boot disks are going into jfs on RAID0 partition.
But they both do exactly the same.  Of course, at first I thought "just
crappy old diskettes" but even new ones do the same thing.  Then I thought
broken diskette drive, so I tested writing and reading the kernel image to
the diskette, and the md5sum's match!

I finally found this: http://tldp.org/LDP/lki/lki.pdf, where on page 8 it
says maximum size of the uncompressed kernel for diskette and cd boots is
2.5 MB, or about 1048560 Bytes for big kernel compressed (bzImage).
Wouldn't you know, my bzImage was 1050640.  Unfortunately, after whittling
everything out of it that I could (no extra debugging, all modules), it's
still 1034KB, and it still doesn't boot.  Probably the new aic79xx driver
is just huge.    Has anyone else hit this limit?

It's a pain using the rescue cd because RH8 doesn't include my scsi host
driver, but I can get that to work.

Kyle