Re: Self-Extracting Boot Floppy - Is it possible?

[Rick Stevens <rstevens vitalstream com>]

Mark W. Knecht wrote:
> Hi,
>    I have a friend that I'm trying to help over the internet. He needs a
> boot floppy, but seems unable to generate one himself from the Linux
> instructions, and so far I can't see what he's doing wrong. One solution was
> for me to simply make one and mail it to him, which I will likely do today,
> but in this internet age that seems so old fashioned... ;-)

Build one how?  From the RH CD's /images directory?  If so, all he needs
to do is copy the "rawrite" utility from the CD to a spot on his
hard disk, then use it to write one of the 1.44M images from the /images
directory to the floppy.

>    Does anyone know of a tool that would allow me to take my Linux boot
> floppy and create a self-extracting image that could be executed on a
> Windows or DOS system (what he has running today) and would generate the
> same boot floppy at his end? That way I could just mail him a file and he'd
> be up and running today.

You could put in your boot floppy, type

	dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/floppy.img bs=1440k

to create the "/tmp/floppy.img" file, then mail him that file along
with the rawrite utility from the CD.
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- Rick Stevens, SSE, VitalStream, Inc.      rstevens vitalstream com -
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