Re: why boot using floppy is very slow?
On Mon, 25 Feb 2002, debianlist wrote:
> I boot my DEbian 2.2R4 using floppy,but the process is very slow..at
>least much slower than other linux distr...how can i improve the speed
>based on boot by floopy...(there is no hardware problem)
> i have a 2.2r4 boot floppy,,can i boot 2.2r5?
I don't think this is anything Debian related. I use Slackware bootdisks
to image lab machines for Debian and Slackware. I find that on some
machines (these are all Pentium class Digital machines), the time to load
the ramdisk takes too long (I'm guessing about >2min, I generally go away
and do something else). On other machines (usually earlier machines) the
time taken to load a ramdisk is good.
Perhaps is has more to with the interaction between the floppy drive
controller and the kernel.
Oh yeah, I also do this on more modern machines too (OEM). IIRC, the time
taken on those is reasonable too, mostly.
Notice that syslinux has an option (-s, IIRC), to create a ``stupid, but
portable'' version, which is slower, which makes me think it _might_ be a
kernel/controller issue.
Perhaps playing with some of the floppy boot-time parameters might help.
See bootparam(7) for more info.
Cameron Kerr
--
cameron.kerr@paradise.net.nz
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~cameronk/
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