Still looking for help creating a boot floppy for Mandrake 9.2. Even in 9.1 I was unable to create that boot floppy. Either way I tried it, having a clean DOS formatted diskette or a reformatted floppy under Linux, the creation would halt saying that there was insufficient free space on that normal 1.44 floppy disk.

Whenever I managed to screw up my boot loader, I used to get around this by booting via CD, then choosing "boot installed OS", but this option does not seem to exist on my Mandrake 9.2 CD's.

I've reinstalled just one time too many and downloaded the various patches and updates to want to keep doing this indefinitely.

THERE'S GOTTA BE A BETTER WAY!

It would be nice to have the extra bit of insurance for that next time I shoot myself in the foot. Any help will be appreciated.

Check out these two tutorials by pmpatrick:

http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=9014

http://www.mandrakeusers.org/index.php?showtopic=11801

Thanks, Kilgoretrout!

That second link explained it perfectly. The problem is obviously the size of the kernel and the various other files needed to create a boot floppy. Now why these recent Linux distributions can't mention that to begin with beats me. I can't recall how many times I tried doing that, all with the same results. Just a tad frustrating, to say the least.

The option to create a boot floppy should either be modified or removed altogether from the installations CD's.

Perhaps some message during that futile process to suggest other means of securing an additional bootable medium.

Anyhow, that second link instructs on how to make a bootable CD instead and I finally have my answer, thanks to your tip!

Cheers!

Thanks for showing me that thread.
I thought there must be a way of creating an iso image to burn- I'll follow the instructions and hopefully understand a bit on the way!

Drakfloppy must be just following a few scripts itself - perhaps a small addition to the man pages would help.

I tried a search on LQs for boot floppy but it didn't come up with anything relevant.

Thanks for bothering to reply - where would we be without contributing members

Thames

Hello,
I appreciated the sentiments in this thread as I had problems with Mandrake 9.1 and the boot floppy routine; I could never get one to actually boot. I learned somewhere to put one of my useless "boot floppies" into the drive and as root enter "lilo -vb /dev/fd0" . This copies your presently working lilo.conf setup to the floppy and at least it will give you the lilo screen and boot from your hard drive in the event that you lose your lilo (say by installing windows updates on another partition --and having MicroSoft wipe your master boot record and lilo).

May 18 2004--I am updating this post with a warning. When I originally posted above ,I was of the opinion that what I described above allowed me to boot either from the floppy or from the hard drive presuming my system was healthy and functioning. Since then, I have reason to believe that Linux wants to remember one boot sector only. So if one used a floppy as above to boot, one may subsequently find that a hard drive boot becomes not possible and to change back, one would have to use said floppy to boot into Linux and then change back to a hard drive boot by typing (as root):

" lilo -b /dev/hda"

which would then add the line "boot=/dev/hda" to the /etc/linux.conf file and on the next boot attempt you would be able to boot once again from the hard drive. I am sorry if this is confusing and am trying to report clearly my experience. Any guru input is of course welcomed.



May 18 2004 --additional update

OK. Since the last update (today), I have experimented further and before describing the fix that I have been seeking allow me to supply some context. I have just learned to use the download/update tools and have sucessfully did the official security updates for Mandrake 9.1 including the rather long (65 MB) KDEbase update. I believe that these just overwrite the allready installed version and do not add that much to your installation in terms of size. But, they may very well have improved the functiionality of some of the tools I have tried to use in the past, e.g., "format a floppy".

Having said that, I fomratted a floppy with no trouble this time (ext2) and then went to a console command line and as root entered:

"mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 2.4.21-0.11mdk"

(the last is the only required argument and is the version # of my kernel found in /boot)

and lo and behold, it actually created a standalone bootable floppy complete with an installer: Here are the files it creates on the floppy

boot.msg* initrd.img* ldlinux.sys* syslinux.cfg* vmlinuz

The installler is the ldlinux.sys and was missing from the installation prompted boot disk that I made and tried to use without results. The total size in bytes is 1.388832 Mbytes and by this one can see that if the kernel is much larger, the whole won't fit on a floppy unless some heroic measures are taken to create a larger capacity floppy.

So there it is as it works for me. I hope that the information posted here justifies the bandwidth used as far as helping some other newbie like me.

robertn[B]