boot diskette

phizix · 08-16-2005, 02:35 AM

Hi I was wondering what the command for creating a bootdisk in linux rescue mode was. I would like to keep my boot partition on hda the way it is. Hdb has my linux installation on it and I would prefer to just boot it with a disk for now. I run linux rescue mode, chroot /mnt/sysimage and then su to root but what do I do from there to make a disk that will boot the os?

phizix · 08-16-2005, 02:36 AM

oops sry for the double post

scuzzman · 08-16-2005, 06:04 AM

Have you tried

Code:

mkbootdisk

phizix · 08-16-2005, 07:53 AM

yea i think i was trying mkbootdisk /dev/fd0 2.6.11-1.1396_FC4 or sumthing to that effect but I was getting errors about disk space. But it didnt seem to access the floppy at all. But I can mount /dev/fd0 to a folder and use the floppy so I know its fd0. I cant remember the exact command I used the last time I made a boot disk and its been awhile.

phizix · 08-17-2005, 04:10 PM

it is possible to boot the os froma disk all the time isnt it? One other thing I should mention is that its a clean install I havent actually went through the first boot setup,.. would that be why mkbootdisk isnt working for me?

sundialsvcs · 08-17-2005, 07:59 PM

Every distribution says, "make a boot diskette!" But that, to me, is lame. A growing number of computers don't even have a diskette drive. But they can all boot from a CD-ROM.

If you cannot get a Linux system to start, then imho the appropriate strategy is to plan to recover using a CD-ROM. Completely reliable, capacity 700MB, very fast. I would simply skip the "make a boot disk" step.

TigerOC · 08-18-2005, 02:54 AM

Which boot loader are you using?

phizix · 08-19-2005, 12:30 AM

Im using the windows boot loader. When I installed fc4 it said that it must initalize hda in order to use it. Erasing all data. So I installed fc4 on hdb and I just want to make a floppy to boot it. I dont want to alter hda at all bootsector included. So I get to the root prompt using rescue mode but for some reason mkbootdisk isnt working for me.

TigerOC · 08-19-2005, 12:55 AM

But what boot loader is being used by fc4? It will either be lilo or grub. The method of making a boot floppy differs between the 2.

phizix · 08-19-2005, 01:28 AM

TigerOC · 08-19-2005, 02:24 AM

Take a known good floppy and format it. Using a shell console or from the command line as root do

fdformat /dev/fd0 (or the number of your floppy drive)

Go into /boot/grub and open menu.lst and check that it is correctly configured relative to your partitions.

Now do grub-install /dev/fd0

If you want to make a boot cd then follow the directions on one of my pages