[NTLUG:Discuss] Linux boot floppy -- making it without windows or dos

[Rick Cook]

On Sunday 09 January 2005 11:11, Peter A. Koren wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 22:09, Ralph Green, Jr. wrote:
> > Howdy,
> >   I may have some good news for you.  In recent versions of
> > Mandrake(I have not tried this on 10.1), Mandrake has a backup plan
> > for those who can't boot from CD 1.  Try booting from CD2.  It worked
> > on a 10.0 system where disk 1 would not boot for me.  It trundles on
> > for a moment or two and boots up far enough to ask you to put CD 1
> > back in and proceed normally from there.
> >   My other suggestion is to go buy a new box of floppies.  Micro
> > Center frequently puts a 10 pack on sale for $1.49.
> > Good luck,
> > Ralph
> >
> > On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 13:39 -0600, Peter A. Koren wrote:
> > > I've got a problem. I just bought the Mandrake 10.1 powerpack set
> > > and want to upgrade. But my computer has a bug and will not boot
> > > off of the CDROM because of some error, probably a faulty BIOS,
> > > even thought I set
>
> These were brand new floppies I bought last week. In the past, when I
> had a dual boot, I just used rawrite under a Windows 98 DOS shell to
> make the boot floppy, copying the image from either the CD or in
> earlier years from the hard disk after downloading the appropriate
> image file. The reason I can no longer do that is that I no longer have
> Windows on my hard disk drive and my Windows 98 and old DOS floppies
> have aged and no longer work. In those previous installs, I never got
> dd to work, which is why I was and still am dependent on Windows for
> making a Linux boot floppy for a new distribution.

The Debian instructions for creating a boot floppy using dd have a few 
other tidbits that may (or may not) be helpful:

 dd if=file of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync ; sync


Rick