[ale] Re: ale Floppy Weirdness posting

[Cor van Dijk]

Rafos701,
Thanks you for your help. The "dd" thing did produce a bootable floppy,
but it was no better than my earlier one, as you already mentioned; I guess
they could not get the kernel and the required modules on a floppy, so
as long as one wants to boot from a floppy, the hoops seem unavoidable.
Meanwhile the discussion is going to be even more academic, because I am
not sure that I like  SuSE 7.3 (it was just an experiment anyway!):
it is slow and it does not have support for my legacy soundcard (Soundblaster
16). I tried to write the bootinformation to /boot of the SuSE drive, but
apparently my BIOS does not allow booting from a logical partition. So
far I have not tried to write the bootinformation to the regular bootsector
(in /dev/hda), but it looks as if that might work. Cor
 
Rafos701 at aol.com wrote:
I hope
you'll excuse the flippancy of my posting, which is sincerely intended
to inform. The "bs=18k" is optional, recommended, but a part of the dd
command the inclusion which I don't fully understand. My sarcasm about
it is intended to provoke peer-review correction on what its usefulness
is.
Although it's a good bet
that "dd"ing (which is a kind of copying,) a boot disk from the disks directory
I recommended will get a bootdisk requiring those same hoops again, going
to the suse directory (likely in the same dir the "disks" dir is, and then
into "images," a copiable kernel can be found. It's easiest to tell you
to use an absolute path, which I'll define as everything between "/" and
whatever kernel, or "image" you've chosen from, e.g. "/cdrom/suse/images/linuxkernel."
The former is included "before" the cdrom, the latter, "linuxkernel," is
a madeup name and probably doesn't appear in the "images" directory. Having
gone "mount  /dev/hdX  /cdrom," where hdX is what the messages
file should show "the" kernel as having named your CD drive, (It's scdX
if you have a SCSI CD,) you do this "copying" by
dd if=/cdrom/suse/images/examplekernel   
of=/dev/fd0
and you change fd0 to fd1
if you've two drives and are using the second.(pattern)
But you should be able to
run lilo from the linux installed on your drive, and it will boot without
your having to do anything more than, maybe, pressing shift and enter.
(Sometimes shift has to
be pressed for some reason, and the name of the kernel you're trying to
boot usually appears by typing the tab key. Booting w/ Lilo on the MBR,
with kernels under 900K, (You have to look in the "parameters" section
of the SuSE manual under "mem" sometimes if using a large kernel getting
you an error complaining about not enough memory) Booting with Lilo on
the MBR should work without using floppies despite your use of the swapping
drive.