MandrivaThis Forum is for the discussion of Mandriva (Mandrake) Linux.
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Making a boot floppy will fail because the kernel is to large to fit on a floppy disk. You could change the 'boot=' entry in /etc/lilo.conf to reference the floppy, and rerun /sbin/lilo (as root) to produce a floppy that contains the lilo bootstrap loader.
Whenever you run lilo, you need to make sure that there weren't any errors, because of there was, the information in the mbr won't be altered.
One alternative to produce an emergency boot floppy is to use:
mkrescue --iso
This will produce a rescue image that you can burn to a cd disc. There will be a menu option to boot up from the hard drive.
Some other distro's have a mkbootdsk --iso option, but Mandrake's script doesn't have that option unfortunately.
Change the entry: boot=/dev/hda2
to
boot=/dev/fd0
unless your floppy drive is refered to otherwise, such as /dev/fd1440.
Also remember to unmount the disk before ejecting it or the data won't be written.
Change it back after finishing. What this will do is write the MBR type data to the floppy instead of the MBR area of the drive. The 'mkrescue --iso' program could also be used to produce an .iso file for a rescue CD. This is also a boot CD.
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A couple of notes:
1) I assumed that your computer can boot normally from the hard drive.
2) Pay attention to what lilo print outs when you run the command to write to the floppy.
If there is an error in an /etc/lilo.conf entry, the disk will not be written. Aside from a
lilo.conf syntax error, if a stanza refers to a non-existing partition, then lilo will also fail.
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