booting 0.8.2 from floppy

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: booting 0.8.2 from floppy
started by: oldguy

Posted by oldguy on Oct. 13 2004,02:13

Since I don't have a CD burner and want to run
Linux on my old IBM Thinkpad, I went ahead and bought
a copy of DSL 0.8.2.

Since the laptop can't boot from CD, I hoped to find
a floppy boot image for that version, but don't see anything.

I did find 0.8.0 floppy boot images, but seem unable
to save them to a floppy from the ftp sites.

So, can I use another floppy image to boot from?
If so, how do I save it to my floppy?

My PC runs RH7.1, so Linux commands are doable.
The browser I'm using is Mozilla 0.7

Posted by ke4nt1 on Oct. 13 2004,02:35

The boot-0.8.0.img image IS for the DSL 0.8.2 CD you purchased..

Here is a link to it..
< ftp://ibiblio.org/pub....8.0.img >

after downloading, use this command in linux to write the image to the floppy..

dd if=boot-0.8.0.img of=/dev/fd0

Make sure you are using a known good or new floppy...

73
ke4nt

Posted by doom4 on Oct. 13 2004,06:17

or if you dont have linux install get this < here >

hf!

Posted by oldguy on Oct. 13 2004,17:11

Thanks for the info.

Last night, after I posted, I was able to download it
to a new floppy directly, which apparently doesn't work.

When I put the floppy into the laptop, it came up
with the "non-system disk" error. Don't know if I
need to download to the hard drive (in RH 7.1
on my PC) THEN do the "dd..." commands to write it
to the floppy. I know I have rawrite somewhere, but
want to do it purely in Linux if I can...

Gotta figure out what I did wrong.

Posted by roberts on Oct. 14 2004,21:10

I am pretty sure RedHat would have the wget and dd commands. So, yes, do first download the boot floppy image and then you write it to a floppy.

So step 1, download the boot floppy image using the following command

wget < http://www.ibiblio.org/pub....8.0.img >

Step 2. As user root, place a new or known good floppy, ( no bad sectors ) into the first floppy drive.
Now write the boot floppy image to the floppy using the following command:

dd if=boot-0.8.0.img of=fd0

Assuming RedHat has these two commands, this 2 step process will produce a boot floppy for DSL v0.8.x

Posted by oldguy on Oct. 17 2004,03:04

Yee Hah!

Thanks for the help, all.

I followed the directions on writing the boot image to the floppy
and it came up!

Of course, being an old laptop, the original image was a mess, but...

I searched the forums and found the references to entering
'fb800x600'. Used that at boot and it's thing of beauty.

Now to squeeze a couple hundred MBytes of hard drive out of this
old beastie and do a hard drive install (plus see if it'll run my
orinoco gold wireless card)

:cool:

Posted by ke4nt1 on Oct. 17 2004,04:13

The orinoco wireless card should "pretty much" be a plug-n-play operation..

Lots of success stories here with that card..

73
ke4nt

Posted by oldguy on Oct. 17 2004,16:57

I saw the orinoco reference while it was shutting down, so
I guess I'm about ready to run.

Now to get my wireless LAN going again...