Faster - Smaller Boot Floppy!

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Remember I'm talking here about the DOSBootFloppy, not the KNOPPIXBootFloppy. Except for the rescue disk, a la WINME, its been a pain to get anything related to DOS working since real DOS mode disappeared after WIN98.

Regards,

[A. Jorge Garcia]

>>
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

Replace /dev/hda2 with your knoppix partition. This copies the first 512 bytes of hda2 (the bootsector) into the first 512 bytes of your floppy.
<<

OK, what will this boot? Will this boot an install from knoppix-install or knx-hdinstall? Will this boot c:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX off a VFAT32 partition?

TIA,

[garyng]

>>
dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 count=1

Replace /dev/hda2 with your knoppix partition. This copies the first 512 bytes of hda2 (the bootsector) into the first 512 bytes of your floppy.
<<

OK, what will this boot? Will this boot an install from knoppix-install or knx-hdinstall? Will this boot c:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX off a VFAT32 partition?

TIA,

It will boot anything that is defined in the lilo.conf when lilo was run. So if you have done a 'poorman's HD install', it can be booted using this method. Just modify the lilo.conf as needed.

The downside of this method is that it can only boot that particular machine as the 512 byte points to a list of specific disk sectors on that pariticular setup.

If you want flexbility(one floppy fits all machine), I would recommend :

cat stage1 stage2 > /dev/fd0

This will give you a GRUB floppy that can be used on almost any machine. Not as quick as the method mentioned above(must load about 200k images) but it is the most convenient boot loader and very easy to prepare and setup.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I just installed a new lab of 25 Dell Optiplex GX270s using the "Poor Man's Dual Boot" and this DOSBootFloppy method.

In my old lab, I used paired down WIN98 rescue disks plus the following autoexec.bat:

c:
cd c:\knoppix
loadlin vmlinuz ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=en vga=791 initrd=miniroot.gz quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix

That was for booting off hda1. Now I'm booting off hda5 and the vga=791 cheat had to be replaced with vga=normal screen=1024x768 xvrefresh=60. Otherwise I was stuck with 640x480 resolution. I can't get sound to work on these PCs, but I'll live for now. So I installed 20030726 (see http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=21881) and used the following autoexec.bat from a WINXP boot disk:

d:
cd d:\knoppix
loadlin vmlinuz ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=en vga=normal screen=1024x768 xvrefresh=60 initrd=miniroot.gz quiet BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix

I hate these onboard intell chips for video and sound. If anyone has problems with these video chips, maybe this will help. Anyone know how to deal with the sound chip? alsa didn't help....

Regards,

[tekmate]

Drvspace.bin is needed by any one unfortunate enough to have compressed their hard drive. You can safely delete it in this case.

[cryptwizard]

rescue files are those that Microsoft claim can fix you computer like scandisk etc.
to remove them open an explorer window, select the files that you know you need (eg, autoexec.bat *.sys) and go to edit->invert selection and then press shift+delete and viola, all gone no more crap

[cryptwizard]

also damn straight about GRUB. I'm using grub for my bootloader and its the best bootloader ive seen since... ever.
the proper command to make a floppy is:

dd if=/boot/grub/stage1 of=/dev/fd0 count=1
dd if=/boot/grub/stage2 of=/dev/fd0 seek=1

for the paranoid you can also put bs=512
ive just got a snapshot of grub2. i cant wait to reboot into my custom made linux distro and check it out.