Re: Creating a bootable floppy

[Derrik Pates]

On Tue, 18 Sep 2001, Greg Ward wrote:

> I want to create a bootable floppy with both GRUB and my kernel.  (I'm
> running GRUB 0.5.96.1 on what started out as a Progeny Debian 1.0
> system, but is getting progressively closer to Debian "testing", with
> Linux 2.4.2.)
>
> I must be missing something obvious, but the GRUB info document just
> says to dd the stage 1 and stage2 files onto the floppy -- nothing about
> putting a kernel there.  I want a boot floppy that 1) is completely
> independent of my hard drive, and 2) allows me to select my root device
> at boot time.  (The idea is that with one boot floppy, I'll be able to
> boot my hard disk if all I screw up is the MBR or boot sector, or a
> rescue ZIP disk if my hard disk is toast, or a rescue floppy if not even
> the ZIP drive is available.)

Make an MS-DOS filesystem on the floppy. Mount it, and do "grub-install
--root-directory=[mountpoint] '(fd0)'". That'll install the GRUB stage 1.5
and stage 2 components onto the filesystem. It'll also create a device.map
file, which can be ignored or removed. Just create an appropriate menu.lst
file on the disk, and put your kernel (you should still have about 1.2 MB
available on the disk) onto the disk. You'll then have a workable boot
floppy which will boot completely independently of any hard drive, with
support for all the filesystems that GRUB supports (so you can load any
kernel off any supported FS).

Or, that'd be _my_ recommendation, anyway. :) And yes, I've done something
similar, so this should work perfectly.

Derrik Pates      |   Sysadmin, Douglas School   |    #linuxOS on EFnet
address@hidden |     District (dsdk12.net)    |    #linuxOS on OPN