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

[Alvin Goats]

> 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.
> 


First issue of a CDROM not booting: does an OLDER version of the
software boot? If so, it is a BIOS thing with the boot format of the CD.
Eltorito works like a charm on my system, buth the ISOLinux boot does
absolutely nothing! This may be your problem with booting the CD
directly.

FLOPPIES:
See if you have fdformat or superformat on your machine. Assuming the
floppy is /dev/fd0:

fdformat /dev/fd0u1440
mkfs -t msdos -c /dev/fd0

will format a 3.5 inch floppy as an HD, 1.44M floppy.

superformat /dev/fd0 hd

will format a 3.5 inch floppy as a high density 1.44M floppy.

Make sure you clean your floppy drive first. It sounds like it hasn't
been used in a while and the heads will pick up dust and form a little
oxidation. Cleaning the disk drive first is critical.

Once you have a clean disk, you can then write the raw data to disk. 

I use Slackware, and I found that cp does some interesting things: cp
boot.raw /dev/fd0 will write an image file (boot.raw) directly to the
device, like rawrite does. cp /dev/fd0 image.raw will copy the image of
the device to a file named image.raw. Just an FYI...

Alvin