Procedure to Create a Boot Disk if You Can t Boot Off CD-ROM

Procedure to Create a Boot Disk if You Can't Boot Off CD-ROM

The procedure in this section has nothing to do with the Integrity server or even new IA-32 systems. This is a procedure to create a boot floppy if you have an old system that won't boot off of a CD-ROM. I included this to demonstrate how to use a couple of commands to create a boot floppy. This can be important because many people get started with Linux on old systems. This is one of the strengths of Linux: It runs on most hardware, including old systems.

If you can't boot from your CD-ROM, you can create the boot floppy using MS-DOS and the rawrite utility included on the Red Hat CD-ROM in the dosutils directory using the following procedure. Note that this procedures assumes that your CD-ROM is D: and that you can boot to a DOS prompt that can read the Linux CD-ROM:

 C:\> d: D:\> cd \dosutils D:\dosutils> rawrite Enter disk image source file name: ..\images\boot.img Enter target diskette drive: a: Please insert a formatted diskette into drive A: and press --ENTER-- : [Enter] D:\dosutils> 

rawrite asks you for the file name of a diskette image. In this case, the images is located at ..\images\boot.img. rawrite produces a Linux bootable floppy off of which you could boot to load Linux.

You can also make a diskette under Linux using the dd command. To do so, you must have permission to write to the device representing a 3.5-inch diskette drive /dev/fd0. If you have that permission, insert a floppy into the diskette drive but don't mount it. After mounting the Red Hat Linux CD-ROM, change to the directory containing the desired image file, and use the following command:

 # dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k 

This copies whatever is in boot.img to your floppy disk (/dev/fd0).