Boot floppies

snowdog · 09-01-2002, 09:27 PM

Hey guys! I'm wondering how to make a boot floppy for Debian 2.2r from Mandrake 8.2. I've made a few boot disks for Linux from Windows, but I'm not using Windows anymore. My g/f's W98se box is here and all samba'd up with my Linux computer (my smb.conf file is my pride and joy), but I'm not learning anything using DOS to do this again. Any suggestions would help. Thanks in advance.

snowdog · 09-01-2002, 09:46 PM

A quick follow up. I would like to try Debian on an older computer (PPro200MHz, 96MB EDO, two 1.6G HDD) that dosen't boot from the cdrom (I upgraded the BIOS already, no luck with the booting thing, floppy or hard drive only). Hey, thanks for reading this.

wartstew · 09-01-2002, 11:11 PM

use:

dd if={floppy image file} of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024

you might have to replace the "fd0" with the correct format device name. For example if it is a 1722 kb image file, you'll need something like "fd0h1722". Do an "ls /dev/fd0*" for a list of available formats.

Of course, the floppy disk does not have to be pre formatted, but does have to be a 100% perfect disk.

Thymox · 09-02-2002, 05:43 PM

Just out of curiosity, is the bs=1024 necessary? I never put it in, and my floppies created in this way (i.e. without the bs param) work fine. Just curious.

wartstew · 09-02-2002, 06:24 PM

Not sure.

It seems I also have had it work, but sometimes I think I haven't. Perhaps it depends on the format size of the disk image? "man dd" talks about the option quite a bit, but I guess I don't understand why it would matter.