[NTLUG:Discuss] boot diskette problem

[bkontr]

Kyle Davenport wrote:
> 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,

Methinks there's probably some more whittling down of the kernel to do. 
   You may even want to try an older kernel as they might able to be 
made less hefty than the new kernels. Another thought is that you could 
just put the driver on a floppy and load the module from there after you 
boot from the RH install/rescue cd.

Regards,
Brian