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

[Peter A. Koren]

On Mon, 2005-01-10 at 21:10, Rick Cook wrote:
snip...
snip...

> > > On Sat, 2005-01-08 at 13:39 -0600, Peter A. Koren wrote:
> > > > 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
> >
> > These were brand new floppies I bought last week. In the past, when I
> > had a dual boot, I just used rawrite under a Windows 98 DOS shell to
> > make the boot floppy, copying the image from either the CD or in
> > earlier years from the hard disk after downloading the appropriate
> > image file. The reason I can no longer do that is that I no longer have
> > Windows on my hard disk drive and my Windows 98 and old DOS floppies
> > have aged and no longer work. In those previous installs, I never got
> > dd to work, which is why I was and still am dependent on Windows for
> > making a Linux boot floppy for a new distribution.
> 
> The Debian instructions for creating a boot floppy using dd have a few 
> other tidbits that may (or may not) be helpful:
> 
>  dd if=file of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync ; sync
> 
I tried and still get bad blocks. I'll try making some boot disks at the
Linux install group at our Saturday meeting.

-- Pete