potato vanillla boot-floppies packange cant make boot floppy on HP Omnibook 6000
Two problems to mention:
Firstly:- 2.2.16 boot-floppies and vanilla rescue/root image from latest
potato disk image (reported as Linux 2.2.17 from Kernel-image-
2.2.17-2.2.17pre6-1) cannot make a boot floppy.
I've tracked the problem down to utilities/dbootstrap/bootconfig.c
where the superformat command is issued. For some reason this fails
following a brief access to the disk drive. Issuing the command from the
console (Alt-F2) works fine. Results are the same whether or not the
floppy is connected internally or via parallel port.
Secondly:- I was forced into this because lilo doesnt seem to be able to
make a boot record for an extended partition (cylinder>1023) in my
environment even though I thought lba32 is supported on the official
release. Neither Mandrake 7.1 or RedHat 7.0 suffer from this, both of
which install OK albeit with manual tweaks to lilo.conf afterwards.
Not sure whether these are known bugs (although cant find much on the
mailing or bug lists) or HP specific problems.
Currently I dont have a workaround to get a system up and running. I'm
reluctant to put lilo on the MBR and I unfortunately have to have
Win2000 occupying the rest of my hard disk for my employers benefit!
--
Dave Williams @ Home
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