I'm needing a bootdisk....
Using LILO(graphical preferably?) to boot to either hda, or fd0.
A way to have more than one partition on a floppy? Ideally, this bootdisk would have LILO in the mbr, then be able to boot to the hard drive, or to a DOS parition on the floppy.

Anyone care to create one for a poor, uninformed young soul?

The insane one.

Unless someone knows something that I don't (which is possible), you cannot do this with a floppy. MBRs and partitions are unique to hard drives.

If you put LILO in the MBR of your hard drive, one of its options can be to boot from the floppy--this could give you your DOS A:\ prompt.

Another alternative is to use two floppies. One boots Linux and the other is a plain old DOS boot disk.

Can't you boot off your first install disk, like Mandrake 9.0's can? Then you can choose to re-install Lilo from the Rescue options.

I think a floppy bootdisk image would be kernel specific btw...I think...

I think deadbug is correct, you can't do multiple partitions on a floppy.

Since Lilo requires either a linux partition or an MBR, you are kind of out of luck.

But...

Since you are putting DOS on that floppy anyway, why not just build a little boot menu using the old DOS config.sys "menu" command and have one of your boot choices run "loadlin.exe" and boot a Linux kernel from somewhere (hopefully a DOS partition on a hard drive, because it will take up a lot of room on that floppy). It should give you the same functionality.

Summery: copy your kernel file (and initrd file if you are using one) to somewhere where DOS can get to it (ie, a DOS file system somewhere), have a line somewhere in a DOS batch file that does something like: "loadlin c:\vmlinuz initrd=c:\root.bin root=/dev/hda2".

It should work great.

I guess I need to back up and ask why Dukeleto needs this thing in the first place? How and why is it going to be used?

Good point.
My default Lilo options are (iirc):
windows, Linux, Linux-nonfs (?) fail-safe, and floppy.
That's 3 different drives, all automatically added and working fine. No boot disks needed.

Thats "Linux-nonfb" by the way. What it means (non-framebuffer) is that the kernel won't support graphics cards in graphics mode. You are likely booting straight into Xfree86 anyway, so you probably don't care, or notice a difference (except during bootup, things won't be pretty) unless you *don't* have your Xfree86 configured to use native accelerated drivers and thus have Xfree86 *using* the kernel supported display framebuffer, in which case X won't even start in nonfb mode.

Yeah I go straight in at runlevel 5.
Why might I want to disable the framebuffer?
I am using the generic nVidia drivers atm. Might I disable fb once I upgrade the drivers for a performance increase?

Mandrake puts is there in case it is needed. If the normal option doesn't work, and the problem is with video, you could try that. Red Hat, on the oother hand, thinks it is so unlikely that you will ever need it, that they only give you instructions how to interrupt the boot process and manually issue the command.

For the most part, no one ever needs this. Curious about what it does? Try it! It won't hurt anything.

(about "nonfb" mode)

I've needed it at times. If you have an older video card, or a real cheap AGP one with no onboard memory coupled with a VIA AGP chipset that isn't supported by the default kernel, then the framebuffer mode might give you no video. The kernel is suppose to detect this, but sometimes it is fooled by a card that "almost works". Also, on old slow computers, you will notice that framebuffer mode is much slower than text mode. It also uses more system resources.

But most people use newer computers, so framebuffer mode just works, and is very nice. It also provides a nice "safe mode" to get into Xfree86 in case your normal accelerated video driver has problems. In fact a lot of people are using Xfree86 in this mode an not realizing that their accelerated driver isn't working. The clue is all the people that report that their Ctrl-Alt- + sequence won't change video modes.

Ok, cool. Thanks guys

This sounds like this would work.....one more problem....
A way to boot to the hard drive, I need this as a bootdisk, it's not for my hard drive. Actually, it's a compact flash card. So.....dos partition with loadln, to load linux, or DOS, what about booting to the hard drive?

Okay, now we're beginning to figure out what you need.

First off, how is this flash card connected to your computer? Is it on a USB port? (In which case you might look at this little Linux distro that is specifically designed for this: http://www.ncsu.edu/resnet/runt) or is it on a PCMCIA/Cardbus slot on a laptop? Or is is something else?

Next, does this computer have a hard drive with some sort of operating system on it that you can use to store some files and/or programs you could use to boot into your Linux-on-a-flashcard? If so what is the OS and What is the file system? Otherwise can you boot something from a CDROM you can make instead?

Finally, assuming the hard drive above either doesn't exist, or isn't available to you, is the Linux kernel plus any initial ramdisk ("initrd" file) that you need to boot into your flash card small enough to fit on a floppy disk? What is the total size of them?

Also, Do you really need DOS to be on that floppy as well? Can DOS be on a separate one instead? If not, what else (and it's file size) needs to be on that floppy?


PS: You should be able to make this work, we just need to know more about what you are doing to be able to help you. Our biggest problem is that floppies don't hold a lot so we really have to tailor things to your needs to be able to make it all fit.

Are you *really* in Antarctica?

No, not *REALLY* in antarctica, just in spirit. Penguins are my friends. No cdrom at all on this computer. The compact flash IS the bootable drive. *shrug* dunno how. So....I want to boot it to dos. Have the option of loading linux, or booting to the hard drive, or staying on the DOS boot. Hard drive is hda. Want to boot to hda, rather than a partition on hda. Loading linux, I WANT to load a jailbait linux. So...Structure as follows....

Comp boots to compact flash
Into DOS
With a DOS boot menu
Allowing you to boot to either the hard disk, the jailbait linux image, or simply exit the menu onto the cf card.

Doable?