Boot Floppy
 

OK, I'm going to be VERY specific here, because I'm not sure exactly where I went wrong.

I had some partition troubles, and had to reinstall both 'Doze and RedHat. One of my partitions disappeared. First, my /var/www/html partition disappeared in Linux.

I decided, in the interests of simplicity, that instead of separate partitions for /, /home, /usr/local, and /var/www/html, I'd just use one big 9440 MB partition--and of course, DiskDrake didn't like that, and asked me to make a 50 MB /boot partition in order to get a / partition that's over 8 GB.

Shortly afterwards, I lost my f:\ in 'Doze. I then went and installed 'Doze, which of course replaced my master boot record.

I discovered, to my horror, that my old RedHat boot disk didn't work. Fortunately, I was able to restore LILO by using the "linux rescue" function on the install CD to get the dummy system with my system in /mnt/sysimage, and using the following commands:

cd /mnt/sysimage/sbin
lilo -r /mnt/sysimage/

(This correctly replaced LILO, so my computer is working properly, again).

Now, I wanted to make a new boot floppy to get into RedHat in case I overwrote my MBR again, so I booted into Linux, opened up a bash window, and used mkbootdisk, which, IIRC, is in /usr/sbin (I'm not typing this on my own computer, so I can't just check. I'm on a Win98-based lab computer right now)

mkbootdisk -v --device /dev/fd0 2.4.2-2

mkbootdisk told me that it couldn't find my root partition in fstab. I opened up fstab, and to my horror, / (/dev/hdb5) was not listed.
/dev/hdb1 (my /boot partition) WAS, but /dev/hdb5 wasn't.

1) Is there any way I can SAFELY modify fstab so that mkbootdisk will work, or

2) is there an X application that will allow me to format and create a boot floppy.

I haven't tried to format a floppy under Linux since I was running Mandrake, as I was unable to. The disk formatter just wouldn't work. I can't remember if I tried to format it as a DOS floppy or ext2--I don't even KNOW if the disk formatter I see in RedHat will work.

You should be able to add the line with no problem. Also, did you edit your lilo.conf so that your root= line points to your root ' / ' partition /dev/hdb5 ? Reboot and then try mkbootdisk again.