Forgive me, I thought I had posted in programming but a search all forums can't find so I will try in newbies as this is new to me.

SITUATION
I have 3 floppies that boot to load a program that I would like to have transferred to cdr.
floppy 1 has a bootable mbr some files and one file split onto the 3 floppies.
the 2 other floppies have no bootable mbr

I know I can join the split file like this (file1 file2 file3 on each floppy)
cat fi* > bigfile

I tried to use dd to grab the mbr and also make an iso these 2 ways
try 1) dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/floppy1.img ditto floppy 2 &3
cat fl* > image.iso and burn to cdr and reboot fails

try 2 ) dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/mbr.img bs=512 count=1
then grab remaining files and combine the split file
then burn to cdr and reboot fails.

REQUEST
Anyone know how to do it or links please?

thanks for your patience

Here's one page that may help.
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/cd-roms.html

Here's a more detailed page that attempts to take a two disk boot image / data set and convert to a cd-rom - a close match to what you're trying to do.

http://nightowl.radified.com/bootcd/bootcdintro.html

HTH,

Nawar

that link is not bad but I am trying to use MS executables.
However, man mkisofs has info and my new attempt has a segmentation fault

mkisofs -o cd.iso -hard-disk-boot /a/g/A/mbr -R -r /a/g/A/
Segmentation fault

tried with su and user account.

heres an explain of what I think I have done so far.

-o create filename with name cd.iso
-hard-disk-boot /a/g/A/mbr use a bootable image off the hard disk that is not a 1440 Kb image etc but just a mbr with pathway of /a/g/A/mbr
-R -r for rockridge and easy user parameters
/a/g/A/ is supposed to be the folder to create the iso from of the form cd_dir or /pathway to folder format.

anyone the wiser?

Try this;

Firstly create a temporary directory in your home directory

mkdir /home/your_user_name/tmp

Create an image of the floppy in this directory, so do;

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

Now we have an image of the floppy disk we can create a boot iso to burn to a cd. Again from a consol do;

mkisofs -r -b /home/your_user_name/tmp/boot.img -c boot.cat -o /home/your_user_name/tmp/bootcd.iso .

Note the "." on the end of this line it is important

Now you can burn the iso file to a cd.

Tiger

That is looking like it but still have some minor fails.

I turned on verbose mode with mkisofs -v -v

I think your boot floppy image is a winner now can I ask how to I add more files to the bootable cdr?

.

in the meantime just tried your version with -root (=pathway) and absolute with the root giving me this (without adding files)

mkisofs -v -v -root /a/g/A/ -r -b acro1.img -c boot.cat -o /acro.iso.

result output is
mkisofs 2.01 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
mkisofs: Missing pathspec.

and when I tried the absolute pathway to img pressing the tab to autocomplete was working .....sooo close

online manpage

http://linuxmanpages.com/man8/mkisofs.8.php

There must be a way of adding additional files. I remember when making boot cd's for w32 they were added in additional directory.

note in the line;

mkisofs -r -b /home/your_user_name/tmp/boot.img -c boot.cat -o /home/your_user_name/tmp/bootcd.iso .

at the end .../tmp/bootcd.iso .

there is a space between the iso and the "."

Tiger

That made a huge diff....and my manpage does not mention that SPACE or gap so well done.

I have not quite solved it as I have a new error on finding the floppy1 image but I think its now just a matter of time.

Once I have succeeded (I hope) I will post my output so anyone else might like to give it a shot.

Thanks for your patience.