boot hard drive from floppy?

Xamindar · Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 5:17 am Post subject: boot hard drive from floppy?

I have an old system here that is mainly scsi drives. But I want it to have gentoo on an ide drive and use all the scsi drives for storage.

My problem is that this system will not boot from the ide drive for some reason. I have already installed gentoo on the ide drive by using another computer so all I need now is a floppy that can point to the ide drive to boot. Will tomsrtbt work for this? Is there any tools in gentoo to make a custom rescue disk that is able to boot a hard drive using lilo on grub?

I remimber mandrake used to have something like this many years ago (this pc used to have mandrake linux on it) in which I just kept a floppy in the drive that would boot the hard drive for me.

It should be as simble as editing the lilo.conf file or something.

jimmywithtorch · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 27

If you have access to a working Linux system, you can prepare a generic GRUB boot floppy as described in the GRUB menual here,
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Creating%20a%20GRUB%20boot%20floppy

then you can boot any Operating System by editing /boot/grub/menu.lst file. You can use a linux or windows machine to edit menu.lst, it doesn't matter.

If you have difficulty creating a GRUB boot floppy, I have a generic GRUB boot floppy image on my website here,
http://geocities.com/jimmywithtorch/

In windows you can write that image to a 1.44MB floppy using RawWrite, and in Linux with the following command, when floppy is unmounted
dd if=genericgrub.bin of=/dev/fd0

I named the image genericgrub.img but yahoo geocities didn't allow me to upload a file with an extension .img so I renamed with .bin extension

Xamindar · Posted: Tue Mar 29, 2005 6:31 am Post subject:

Hey thanks for the reply!

I just tried the grub thing but how do i edit the /boot/grub/menu.1st on the floppy? What filesystem does the grum boot disk use?

jimmywithtorch · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 27

As I said,

Xamindar · Posted: Fri Apr 01, 2005 12:48 am Post subject:

I used the grub boot disk and it was not mountable. It's ok though, I may try your boot disk from your site next chance I get. Thanks.

jimmywithtorch · n00b Joined: 03 Sep 2004 Posts: 27

Use this method to create a GRUB floppy

Xamindar · Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 3:46 am Post subject:

thank you so much for your help. This is what I want and the floppy boots just fine now.

But, when I try to select the partition "root (hd3,0)", as i installed gentoo on the 4th disk (one ide drive and third scsi drive down), grub gives me an error about "Partition table invalid or corrupt".

GRRR!! What the hell is wrong with this? In fact it gives me this error on EVERY drive and EVERY partition I point it to. On the other hand I can use mandrakes lilo boot disk to boot up the mandrake install just fine (but I haven't been able to get lilo on that floppy to work with gentoo).

Xamindar · Posted: Mon Apr 04, 2005 6:48 am Post subject:

maybe grub doesnt work on this computer. Is it possible that grub doesn't work and lilo does?

I FINALLY got this thing to boot by reinstalling mandrake on another drive, booting it, repartitioning another drive as my gentoo drive.
Then I copied all the gentoo stuff from the old drive to the new drive, edited mandrake's lilo.conf to allow booting the new gentoo drive, rebooted to gentoo and then installed it's lilo.

Man what a mess. My problem before might have been caused by having the ide drive installed. This system isn't built for ide. Oh well.
Grub still dont work though.