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

[Terry Henderson]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2005 23:07:44 -0600, Peter A. Koren
<p.koren at worldnet.att.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
 I think your suppositions are flawed.  I've had little or no trouble
with dd or rawrite either one as long as floppys were good.  I don't
think one is any better than the other.  Not much difference as far as
I can tell, they both work just fine as long as media and hardware is
ok.

> 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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> >
> >
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> 
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