Making a spare boot up floppy

[Jeff Vian]

Homer Sapions wrote:

> I agree - there is nothing much to beat a CD booted to rescue mode. I 
> have used them many times in various flavors of RedHat 7.1, 7.3, 
> Advanced Server 2.1 and 3, and always succeeded in repairing problems. 
> Usually stupid ones, like figuring out what files to look out for when 
> restoring a server rebuilt for a DR test - specifically files like 
> fstab, network configs, raidtab, modules.conf, lilo.conf and 
> grub.conf, and of course the one guaranteed to be a problem if you try 
> to restore/copy or in any way overwrite it - /lib/i686/libc-xxx.so. 
> Try overwriting libc sometime and watch the fun - it's sure to end up 
> making it into a zero byte file and panic the kernel, and make the 
> system unbootable.
>
I agree on the utility of booting from CD.  However, the OP had asked 
what he did wrong in trying to make the bootable floppy.  :-)


It never hurts ot answer the question that was asked.  :-)

>
>> From: Ben Steeves <bcs at metacon.ca>
>> Reply-To: bcs at metacon.ca,For users of Fedora Core releases 
>> <fedora-list at redhat.com>
>> To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
>> Subject: Re: Making a spare boot up floppy
>> Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 22:03:52 -0400
>>
>> On Sun, 2004-03-28 at 18:42, Jeff Vian wrote:
>> > The easiest way to make a usable (and bootable) image of a boot floppy
>> > is with dd.
>> > Use "dd if=/dev/fd0 of=boot.img bs=512 count=2440" to create the file
>> > boot.img that is an exact copy of the floppy.
>> >
>> > That will create a bootable image of the floppy that then can be put
>> > back onto another floppy using rawrite from dos/windows, or dd on 
>> linux.
>>
>> Of course... for rescuing a failed/broken Fedora installation, the CD is
>> actually quite good.  It holds a lot more handy software than a boot
>> floppy.  I consider floppies to be 'single use' devices... at least for
>> critical uses.  After being burned (badly) by some "rescue" disks that
>> couldn't several years back, I have never depended on them again.  CDs
>> all the way!
>>
>> > Barry Yu wrote:
>>
>> > >I want copy all contents in the bootable floppy into my data 
>> storage partition, and copy them back into a blank floppy in case I 
>> need - I had bad experience in open a blend new box of floppy and 3 
>> consecutive floppy even not workable at all! I must prepare if the 
>> current boot floppy one day is gone. Moreever, I really want to know 
>> above copy process what have I missed that caused the new floppy not 
>> bootable even with correct contents in it (At least I can't see what 
>> I had missed).
>> > >Thanks for helping.
>>
>> -- 
>> Ben Steeves                     _                    bcs at metacon.ca
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>>
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