On Thu, 11 Jan 2001, Scott Patterson wrote: > >Greetings, everyone. > > > >I just migrated from RedHat over to Debian potato and I'm thrilled so > >far. > > > >But, I think my boot disk is defective, since it takes 5-7 minutes for > >the > > > >Loading Linux.............. > > > >process to complete from /dev/fd0 before Linux actually boots. I suspect > >I have a bad floppy, and I want to make a new boot floppy. > > I just had to boot from a floppy and had the same situation. It does take a > LONG > time (I don't remember other distribtions (Redhat, Caldera, etc) boot-floppies > being so slow...), but eventually my system boots up properly. I'd install > LILO > or grub ASAP and not rely on a floppy. IMHO, floppies are an unreliable media.
If you use grub, then your 'unreliable media' would be useful. Grub understands ext2fs, so even if your boot floppy had bad-sectors, you can create a filesystem on it (which will skip the unwritable sectors): superformat /dev/fd0 mkfs -c /dev/fd0 Then, mount the floppy: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt Copy the grub's necessary files to /mnt/boot/grub cp /boot/grub/* /mnt/boot/grub Create menu.lst file in /mnt/boot/grub, which contains (something like): -- cut here # Boot automatically after 30 secs. timeout 30 # By default, boot the first entry. default 0 # For booting Linux title linux1 root (fd0) kernel (fd0)/vmlinuzr root=/dev/hda1 # title linux1_single root (fd0) kernel (fd0)/vmlinuzr root=/dev/hda1 single -- cut here Umount the floppy: umount /mnt Run grub, and then on the prompt type: root (fd0) setup (fd0) quit Reboot your system. BTW, two kernels (which supposed to be having different versions) could fit on a floppy, so you can have more than one versions of working kernels on a single floppy. Oki
