creating Boot cd
 

Hi y'all

I want to create a boot CD. How do I do this? I've tried the command in the RedHat manual but its not working. Help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

geordzilla

we are not all familiar with the redhat manual. Which command did you try

Task j3 of the last link in my signature lists two methods.

You can make a bootable floppy and burn it into a bootable CD using Nero. The CD simulates as a "A" drive. This method can be used to burn a bootable floppy made by Red Hat, using the command like
The traditional method is to use Linux "mkisofs" command. For that you need to compile an iso file for booting. The Task J3 describes a Grub bootable CD which can boot any PC system "manually".

Creating bootable cd
 

Hi again.

I use RHEL3, was refering to the mkisofs command in the redhat documentation.

I gave the following command:

mkisofs -o file.iso -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot \ -boot -load-size 4 -boot-info-table -R -J -v -T isolinux/

and got the following error message:

INFO: UTF-8 character encoding detected by locale settings.
Assuming UTF-8 encoded filenames on source filesystem,
use -input-charset to override.
mkisofs: No such file or directory. Invalid node - -boot.

I'm a newbie and really do not comprehend what it means.

I tried the the command "grub-install /dev/fd0" that saikee suggested and got is this error:

bash: grub-all: No such file or directory.

What am I doing wrong?

Tanx

geordzilla

The Bash command "grub-install /dev/fd0" asks Grub to replicate itself in device fd0 and that is the floppy. Red Hat distros use Grub mainly and that should work.

Have you typed grub-all instead of grub-install?

Here is a brief summary of how to do this. You can find a more detailed version on my site;

do grub-install /dev/fd0

create a tmp directory ;

mkdir /home/usr_name/tmp

then create an image file;

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/home/usr_name/tmp/boot.img bs=10k count=144

make an iso file;

mkisofs -r -b /home/usr_name/tmp/boot.img -c boot.cat -o /home/usr_name/tmp/bootcd.iso . (note the "." on the end)

burn to cd

Hello again,

The Bash command "grub-install /dev/fd0" comes up with the error message - "bash: grub-install: command not found".

Also i tried the following commands and got similar error messages

1) "mkbootdisk --iso --device boot.iso $(uname -r)"

error message - "bash: mkbootdisk: command not found"

I then did "up2date mkbootdisk" and the output was that "mkbootdisk" is already updated.

I'm at a loss of what happening. What next?

rgds

geordzilla

Make sure you are doing this as root. i.e. open a terminal and do su then enter the root password when requested.

Looks like you have an escape character sequence in there "\" Are you sure it shouldn't be a "/" instead? Try it again changing that character in your command. if you are trying to purposely use a back-slash you may have to put it in twice "\\" to be able to use it because generally it is used as the escape sequence character. (i.e. say you had a filename with a space in it, "some file.txt" you access that file from the command line as "some\ file.txt", the backslash tells the shell that an... odd character is coming next which would be the space and the backslash is used to notify the computer of this).

So try:

mkisofs -o file.iso -b isolinux.bin -c boot.cat -no-emul-boot / -boot -load-size 4 -boot-info-table -R -J -v -T isolinux/

and see what happens... then again, I could be completely wrong here.. which I would blame on lack of sleep :) hahahah

boot cd
 

Hello all,

Finally the iso is created. Tanx y'all for helping. Made me think through it. Problem was that the "mkisofs command" was looking for the full path name "/home/george/isolinux" and not "isolinux/". Which then makes to ask. If "isolinux/" was my current directory when I give the "mkisofs" command, why does it look for the full path name?

Tanx again, y'all.

geordzilla

That's a thing you should ask the people who maintain it. :)