Re: Booting a Compaq 120MB floppy
[ Copied to the fdutils maintainer and the boot-floppies team - comments
please? ]
On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, Siegfried Langauf wrote:
>On Sun, 17 Jan 1999, Steve McIntyre wrote:
>
>> I'll have to admit defeat on this for now. Without having easy access to
>> such a device I can't really do much. And the next time I get this will be
>> sometime in February. Can anyboy else help, or should we just put a
>> prominent warning in the manual that this is not supported yet?
>
>Well, I have easy acess to such a device, and I would be glad if i could
>help to support LS drives. It was quite a bit frustrating do create a boot
>disk manually, just because the install floppies don't support IDE Floppy
>drives.
Yes, I can understand that.
>Basically, you just use /dev/hdc (or whatever is the floppy's IDE device
>name) instead of /dev/fd0. (eg. i created a rescue floppy with
>'cat resc1440.bin >/dev/hdc', 'dd' works as well)
OK, good. I see two real problems:
If you try to install the drivers etc from floppy, the mount fails. This
should be easy to work around - add a question to ask the location of the
floppy drive. I presume copying things off an LS/120 just works, of
course; available evidence supports this.
The other (bigger) problem is the format thing - when we create a boot
floppy, we format it then copy things on. The format is done using
superformat (from the fdutils package), and superformat does some _very_
weird stuff to a floppy drive to try and improve the reliability. We
_may_ be able to patch superformat to work OK on an IDE floppy, but a look
at the source put me off trying.
One question (maybe a way out) - is it really necessary to actually
_format_ the disk. Could we not simply use dd to write another raw copy of
the initial boot floppy to a new one, then write any changes over the top?
>If I can do anything to help (testing, patching, whatever), just let me
>know!
If you're prepared to play with superformat to see if you can get it to
work with your drive, it would be very useful...
--
Steve McIntyre, CURS CCE, Cambridge, UK. stevem@chiark.greenend.org.uk
Getting a SCSI chain working is perfectly simple if you remember that there
must be exactly three terminations: one on one end of the cable, one on the
far end, and the goat, terminated over the SCSI chain with a silver-handled
knife whilst burning *black* candles. --- Anthony DeBoer
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