Re: Booting a Compaq 120MB floppy
On Sat, 23 Jan 1999, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> >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.
It might even be more comfortable if the install script looked at the
output of "dmesg" to see if an ide-floppy drive was found...
> I presume copying things off an LS/120 just works, of
> course; available evidence supports this.
I can confirm that: It works unless you use the wrong device (/dev/fd*).
> 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...
Well, I'm willing to to anything i can, but as i just know enaugh C to
write some "hello world" program, that might me a bit too much for me :-(
I'll try to play with superformat, anyway. Maybe it even works with
ide-floppies...
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Siegfried Langauf Student der Softwaretechnik, Uni Stuttgart
"If one is master of one thing and understands one thing well, one has
at the same time, insight into and understanding of many things."
-- Van Gogh
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