Flopy boot

Forum: User Feedback
Topic: Flopy boot
started by: herve_02

Posted by herve_02 on June 19 2006,10:33

Hello every body.

We are trying to test dsl on a pentium 100 or so, but we didn't succed in booting. The cd-rom can't be chosen on boot time, so we download the bootfloppy.img, dd it to a floopy and inserted in the drive. Cdrom is in the cdrom. The floppy boot (i can see boot: ) but when i press enter, it is said : boot failed, please change disk and press a key to continue. Same thing with dsl toram

I tried to boot with the cdrom on another system, it worked.

What can i do for that ?

Posted by skaos on June 19 2006,11:10

Have you checked that the cd drive is working?
Is it an ide drive?- if not, then that could be the explanation.

Posted by herve_02 on June 19 2006,12:06

yes i did.

The ide cdrom is working. i decided to go barbarian and mounted the HD on another computer and did the hd install from the other computer. I'll see tonight if the computosor is running with that new hard drive already installed : I'll see and tell.

Thanks a lot for that big peace of software.

I'll try to convert that pentium 100 -72Mo RAM to a linux box with a off-line french-wikipedia with lighttpd php4 and mysql for my children.. we'll see what can be done and usefull.

Posted by jjuuaannmmaa on July 11 2006,19:03

I don't want to bother, but can you tell me how to copy bootfloppy.img to a diskette, because I'm in a similar situation, but I don't know how to copy this file into a diskette, because the file is bigger than diskette capacity.
Thanks!

Posted by brianw on July 12 2006,00:19

Quote (jjuuaannmmaa @ July 11 2006,15:03)

under linux you would type
dd if=bootfloppy.img of=/dev/fd0

if is the input file. of is the output file (under unix everything is a file even the devices). This assumes that the floppy disk is the only one (floppy disk zero fd0).

if you are doing it under windows you would use a utility such as rawrite.

the reason the image is bigger than the floppy is because a formatted floppy contains a filesystem on it (DOS, apple, ext2, etc...). When you write an image to the floppy you are writing the filesystem as well so the image writes to the entire disk including the boot sector (writing starts at sector 0). On a formatted disk you only have access to the user sectors.