[NTLUG:Discuss] diskette boot problem

[Kyle Davenport]

Hoping someone here has a clue.  I am mystified.

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
mem/AX/BX/CX'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!

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

One thing I have not been able to find on the 'net is the maximum size of
the kernel.  Both images are now greater than 1 MB (but not 1.44).

Kyle