On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 03:32:08PM -0600, Martin McCormick wrote: > What happened after I zapped the floppy is that fdformat will not > run because it sees no pre-existing format information. > > What am I forgetting or what has changed?
According to the fdformat man page, you should first set the disk parameters with setfdprm, or use a device like /dev/fd0H1440 which refers to a specific format. If any of the device nodes are missing, you can create them with mknod, the major and minor numbers are given in the fdformat man page as well. Other options to boot an old machine could be a Compact Flash card with a CF-to-IDE adapter, or an Ethernet card with PXE support and a BOOTP/DHCP and TFTP server. Regards, Mirko
