Creating bootable zip disk

Chong Yu Meng chongym at cymulacrum.net
Wed Jun 28 02:13:05 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-06-27 at 13:59 -0500, Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> Somehow, I do not think the ISO9660 file system of a CD is what the
> kernel expects on a ZIP disk. Every ZIP disk I have used has had a
> partition table, and usually partition entry number 4 has a file
> system defined on it. In order for the disk to boot, it needs a boot
> loader on ether the MBR or the active partition. A lot of BIOS will
> require that one partition be marked active, though they may not
> require this for a removable drive.
> 
> As someone else pointed out, there is an image on the install CD/DVD
> that is designed for pen drives, but should work just fine on a ZIP
> disk. The main difference from the normal ZIP disk format is that
> partition 1 is used instead of partition 4. (I have no idea why
> Iomega  used partition 4 instead of partition 1.)
> 
> Just as a side note - the original Iomega Linux tools used partition
> 1 if the disk was ext2 formatted, and partition 4 if it was FAT
> formatted. I guess this was to keep the DOS/Windows tools from
> trying to read them.

Hi Mikkel, Paul,

Thanks ! I got it working now with the diskboot.img transferred via "dd"
to the Zip disk. I found out a few other things, though: 

1. If you manually partition the Zip disk, you can get it to use
partition 1 with ext3/ext2, otherwise, as you said, it uses partition 4
by default. The disk boot image will transfer to the Linux partition and
can be recognized on boot.

2. I always thought that you could transfer an ISO9660 image to Zip and
have it boot, which was why I wasted a lot of time trying all kinds of
different combinations to try to get it to work -- I thought there was
something wrong with the disk. drive and/or kickstart instructions.

Thanks and Regards,
-- 
Pascal Chong 
email:  chongym at cymulacrum.net 
web:    http://cymulacrum.net
pgp:    http://cymulacrum.net/pgp/cymulacrum.asc

"La science ne connaît pas de frontière parce que la connaissance
appartient à l’humanité. et que c’est la flamme qui illumine le monde."

-- Louis Pasteur
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