Re: new boot disk?
On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Scott Patterson wrote:
> >Greetings, everyone.
> >
> >I just migrated from RedHat over to Debian potato and I'm thrilled so
> >far.
> >
> >But, I think my boot disk is defective, since it takes 5-7 minutes for
> >the
> >
> >Loading Linux..............
> >
> >process to complete from /dev/fd0 before Linux actually boots. I suspect
> >I have a bad floppy, and I want to make a new boot floppy.
>
> I just had to boot from a floppy and had the same situation. It does take a LONG
> time (I don't remember other distribtions (Redhat, Caldera, etc) boot-floppies
> being so slow...), but eventually my system boots up properly. I'd install LILO
> or grub ASAP and not rely on a floppy. IMHO, floppies are an unreliable media.
If you use grub, then your 'unreliable media' would be useful. Grub
understands ext2fs, so even if your boot floppy had bad-sectors, you can
create a filesystem on it (which will skip the unwritable sectors):
superformat /dev/fd0
mkfs -c /dev/fd0
Then, mount the floppy:
mount /dev/fd0 /mnt
Copy the grub's necessary files to /mnt/boot/grub
cp /boot/grub/* /mnt/boot/grub
Create menu.lst file in /mnt/boot/grub, which contains (something like):
-- cut here
# Boot automatically after 30 secs.
timeout 30
# By default, boot the first entry.
default 0
# For booting Linux
title linux1
root (fd0)
kernel (fd0)/vmlinuzr root=/dev/hda1
#
title linux1_single
root (fd0)
kernel (fd0)/vmlinuzr root=/dev/hda1 single
-- cut here
Umount the floppy:
umount /mnt
Run grub, and then on the prompt type:
root (fd0)
setup (fd0)
quit
Reboot your system.
BTW, two kernels (which supposed to be having different versions) could
fit on a floppy, so you can have more than one versions of working kernels
on a single floppy.
Oki
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