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

[Peter A. Koren]

On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 16:30, Burton Strauss wrote:
> If you are getting bad blocks when you create boot disks on new, reasonable
> quality disks, then the problem is most likely NOT the disks, but the
> drive...
> 
> Try a new Floppy drive.
> 
> -----Burton

And the winner is Burton Strauss. Yes, it was the floppy drive itself. I
salvaged a drive from an old pc and switched out the defective drive. It
all works now as far as I can tell. I will have to wait at least until
the weekend to try to install Mandrake 10.1, so I may be a bit
premature. But there is no doubt that the old drive was toast.

But it is interesting that I have in the past always been able to get
rawrite to work and never have been able to get dd to work with the bad
drive. So I would still say the device driver for floppies under linux,
at least for the format used by boot disks, is not as good as what the
Windows driver provides.

Though I have not tried it, I suspect my old Windows 98 boot floppy will
now work. But the only reason I wanted Windows at all was to make Linux
boot floppies. So no more Windows for me.

--Pete

>  
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: discuss-bounces at ntlug.org [mailto:discuss-bounces at ntlug.org] On Behalf
> Of Peter A. Koren
> Sent: Saturday, January 08, 2005 1:39 PM
> To: Discuss NTLUG
> Subject: [NTLUG:Discuss] Linux boot floppy -- making it without windows or
> dos
> 
> 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 the BIOS
> to try the CDROM first. So I am stuck with using a floppy disk to boot. I
> have been doing this for years on my ABIT BP6 based system.
> 
> The problem now is that all of my old floppy disks have aged into
> uselessness and I could not install windows or dos which I have always used
> before for just one thing -- having rawrite create a boot disk for linux
> using the proper image file on the linux distribution CD. Using the dd
> command under linux does create files on a blank formatted brand new floppy,
> but it also creates bad blocks and I don't want to bother trying to install
> Linux with a copy method that is so buggy. Is there a solution to getting
> the floppy boot method working without resorting to Windows? In any case, I
> do not want Windows on my machine now that my wife uses Linux. That was a
> hard enough battle and I do not want to go back.
> 
> -- Pete
> 
> 
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