Creating a boot disk

[ndhingra]

Please forgive my ignorance.

I installed Linux a couple months ago. I use a floppy disk to boot up to Linux 7. However, this floppy has become corrupt, and I cannot use it to boot up. How can I create a new boot floppy disk (post installation? It said on the redhat site to use rawrite and boot.img. Is that right? Can someone elaborate if it is cause I am confused as to what commands to type in...

Thanks :-)

[Craig McPherson]

You really do have a lot of options. If you have Win9x on the system (but NOT WinME or NT/2K/XP), you can use loadlin to boot the system. This way, you won't even have to worry about the disk.

If you have your RedHat installation CD, you can use it as a boot disc also; just set your system to boot from the CD-ROM. You can also raw write a boot disk image onto a floppy, like what you're suggesting.

Once you boot back into your system, you should create a few boot disks. The easiest way is to simply raw write your kernel onto a floppy disk:

dd if=/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0

This will destroy anything already on the disk.

But why are you booting from a floppy disk anyway? Why not install a bootloader?

And while we're on the subject, there's no such thing as Linux 7. The newest version of Linux 2.4.9.

[ndhingra]

Hi Craig,

Thanks for your suggestion. I am running Windows 2000 right now, and I just wanted to play with Linux a bit and try it out so I created a new partition using Disk Druid. Redhat seemed to suggest that this option would be the most painless option for someone in my shoes (thus I did not install a bootloader)

So I need a little clarification. I don't know Unix at all so bear with me. When I use my RedHat installation CD as a boot disk, I get to a screen where I have several options (install Linux graphically, create rescue disk, etc). is that where I raw write my kernal onto the floppy with the following command: dd if=/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0

Also, when you say that commmand will destroy everything on my disk, I am assuming that is everything on my Linux file system (my win2K files will go untouched?) I know that sounds like a stupid question, but better safe than sorry.

Thanks so much for your patience,
neel

P.S. I should have said that I installed RedHat Linux 7.0.

[Craig McPherson]

When you boot with the installation CD, you should immediately see a boot prompt that says "just press enter here unless you know otherwise." The exact wording may vary by distro. At that prompt, you can boot the Linux system on your hard drive by typing something like "linux root=/dev/hdxx".

When you dd the kernel onto a floppy disk, what I meant was that it'll destroy everything on the floppy disk.