grub floppy backup and restoration

chocloman · 02-01-2006, 05:55 PM

Hi , I use a floppy grub disk in order to boot slackware 10.2 and freebsd 6.0 in my box, so I would like to make a backuo of this floppy and then restore it just in case of floppy failures.

Do you know any application or command that can do that for me?

Any suggestions appreciated.

homey · 02-01-2006, 06:37 PM

# Copy image from original floppy
dd if=/dev/fd0 of=boot.img

# Put that image onto another floppy
fdformat /dev/fd0
mke2fs -m 0 /dev/fd0
dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0

If you decided to create a new grub floppy from scratch....
This gives you the boot menu just like it was installed on the hard drive.

Code:

fdformat /dev/fd0
mke2fs -m 0 /dev/fd0
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /media/floppy
mkdir -p /media/floppy/boot/grub
cp -pa /boot/grub/* /media/floppy/boot/grub
umount /media/floppy

# Create a text file called /home/stuff  ...

cat > /home/stuff << EOF
root (fd0)
#the following is all one line
install /boot/grub/stage1 d (fd0) (fd0)/boot/grub/stage2 0x8000 p (fd0)/boot/grub/menu.lst
#
quit
EOF

# Install grub to the floppy disk with this command:

grep -v ^# /home/stuff | grub --batch

chocloman · 02-02-2006, 02:54 PM

Thanks Homey, great howto, I will try it right now.
dd command ....umm.....it's good to know that.
As always linuxquestions never let me down.

homey · 02-02-2006, 03:06 PM

You're welcome!

One thing to note: the floppy mount point of /media/floppy may be something like /mnt/floppy on your distro.