boot floppy failure

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: boot floppy failure
started by: davide

Posted by davide on Nov. 17 2003,15:58

hi
I lost my boot floppy somewhere and now I can't use DSL on my old 486 anymore.
I'm trying to make a boot floppy by myself (the previous was by a friend of mine) following instructions in the faq, but with no success.
I wonder if I'm doing something wrong. I just think i'm following instructions...but it doesn't work.
here's what I do:

On another pc I run DSL toram
I login as root
I insert a an empty floppy (partitioned as FAT) in the floppy drive
I mount the cdrom and I go to /
I type dd if=/KNOPPIX/boot.img of=/fd0
floppy seems to be written correctly. it's plenty of file when I later browse it.
but..it doesn't boot on my 486.
I also tryed to format it as ext2 from DSL before creating boot floppy.
I also tried to use rawwirte.exe. with boot.img (tried also with mkfloppy.bat)

no luck
Where's the mistake?

please help me I you have any clue..

Posted by skaos on Nov. 17 2003,16:40

You're probably missing the bs option in the dd command. I googled a bit and found the following:

dd if=./boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k
dd if=generic.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k
dd if=KERNEL of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k
dd if=install.144 of=/dev/fd0 bs=8192

I don't know which of the bs's that's correct, test them and tell us which works (if any).

Posted by Gilbert Ashley on Nov. 18 2003,22:34

If you're mounting the CD then you need to got to that directory.
mount /dev/xxx /cdrom
cd /mnt/cdrom or cd /cdrom
then:
ls to see if it's really there. If so then
cd KNOPPIX
ls again, just so you can see it
then:
dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k
Make sure you haven't mounted the floppy as the dd command doesn't work on mounted devices, and be sure to include the /dev before /fd0 which I don't see in your commands above.

Posted by cbagger01 on Nov. 19 2003,00:35

Another option is to use DOS rawite program to make your boot floppy.

You can download rawrite2 and use it to create your boot floppy:

< http://ftp.debian.org/debian/tools/ >

Posted by davide on Nov. 19 2003,10:18

thank you all
i'm pretty sure I copied the right file.
floppy didn't work
maybe it was because fd0 was already mounted but, if so, there wouldn't be any file on the floppy, right? they were there.
probably It's the bs=1k option that's fooling me. i'll try it.
if it doesn't work...well must be a hardware problem.
also rawrite.exe didn't work.

I'll let you know.
thanx
davide