Help! - Boot Disk won't boot
 

I have redhat 8 on a laptop with a USB floppy drive. I can create the boot disk with 'mkbootdisk --device /dev/sbd <kernel>'

however when I test it out, it won't boot off the floppy.

Does your labtop have a BIOS option to boot from your USB floppy drive?

Yes it does !

So what happens when you choose to boot from the floppy, reset your machine and....?

If I boot off a DOS floppy it boots up. If I boot off the redhat boot disk I get the message "boot failed"

Have you tried with more than one floppy? DOes it print more or only 'boot failed'?

Yeah I tried 2 different floppies

Does it print something more? Only 'boot failed'?

Just "boot Failed" at the top of the screen - nothing else

Do you have all you need to boot into the kernel (not as modules)? USB drivers? Drivers for your main filesystem? Do you use kernel you compiled yourself or kernel that came with your distro?

I think so - I'm using the kernel that came from RH - I didn't recompile it myself. The kernel recognizes my USB floppy and/or my USB CDRW when I login.

The system bios is supposed to allow me to boot from the USB floppy without any needed drivers.

I guess you use ext3 filesystem. Look if your kernel uses initrd (ramdisk) to start (as far as I remember, it does).If it does, you need to make the same with the boot floppy (--mkinitargs switch for mkbootdisk).

I tried this:
mkbootdisk --mkinitdargs --with usb-ohci 2.4.18-24.8.0

Not sure if this is the right syntax, it created te disk but got the same results trying to boot from the floppy