[ale] Boot Floppy

[jeff hubbs]

Chris Fowler wrote:

> Currently I use a 1.44mb boot floppy to boot my system off CD-ROM.  Modifying this floppy disk is time consuming due to slow nature of floppy drives.  Basically it is a ext2 FS with a kernel, lilo.conf, device nodes, and initrd 
> image.  Is it possible to use a lopp device to create this image instead of a floppy disk.  Keep in mind that the lilo.conf states /dev/fd0 as the boot device.  Avery time I make a chage to initrd or kernel I issue the following 
> command: lili -r /mnt/fd0 -c lilo.conf .
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris


Chris -

I just took a stab at this using a floppy and it appeared to work.

Here's what I did:  I grabbed a DOS-formatted floppy that was ready for 
re-use, threw it into the drive, su'ed to root, and unmounted 
/mnt/floppy (it had already been automounted).  I typed

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=fltest.img

and let it finish.

I typed

mkdir fltest

to make myself a mount point, and I typed

mount -t msdos -o rw,loop=/dev/loop0 fltest.img fltest

Then I was able to cd fltest and move files around, add files, etc.

When I was done I cd'ed up, unmounted the mount point, performed the 
reverse of the above dd operation, remounted the floppy, and lo and 
behold, there were all my changes.

One problem I saw was that the filenames had been mangled to 8.3 style - 
there may or may not be a way around that; I didn't try.

You can pull this stunt with ISO 9660 CD image files as well. I keep 
ISOs of Linux distros on the file server and I'll do this to pull stuff 
out of them.

This is the kind of stuff that makes Linux r0o||...

- Jeff


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