Fedora Installation :: Create Boot Floppy
Nov 21, 2010
A while ago I made the jump from Mandriva to Fedora. I am very pleased with Fedora, but some things do not seem to be as easy as with Mandriva. Maybe I just got to find my way around and am not aware there are packages that will do what I want, so I think it is a good idea to ask here..Well - I have a multi-boot system. There are a few partitions to test out different Linux versions (like specialised music distro's with low-latency kernels). As a result the MBR gets overwritten by other installs now and then.In Mandriva it was possible to create a simple boot disk without any images - just a "link" or "jump" to vmlinuz etc. on the root partition from the main Linux system. I think only the MBR part was written on the floppy. It was very easy done in the control centre by choosing fd0 in stead of hda as boot medium.
This disk whas a life saver if the MBR was overwritten by another OS intall. I just put in the floppy and boot from that floppy strait into the standard grub menu and so I was able to re-create grub (by doing the same process but pointing to hda in stead of fd0 as boot medium).
Is there a way to create the same simple boot disc under Fedora 14?
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Jan 23, 2009
My goal is to have a dual boot system with Windows and linux. When no floppy is loaded Windows should boot. When a linux boot floppy is loaded linux should boot.Windows (and its boot loader) are on hd0. I installed Fedora 10 to hd1 and had install put the boot loader on that drive. I followed the instructions in http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=150913 to make a boot floppy. But when I use the boot floppy the system brings up the grub prompt and stops.
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Dec 22, 2009
I know that several people have answered this type of question before, but I can't seem to find the information I need to get it working for me. According to my research what I want to do cannot be done. However, i'm sure there must be a way.This is my scenario - I will try to be as accurate as I can be to make it easier for poeple to help. I have a Sony Vaio PCG-141C laptop, the half sized old ones. It has a usb floppy drive that I can boot from. I have also got a usb cd-rom drive but the laptop simply will not boot from it! I have got the F12 cd images downloaded and on a usb hard drive.
I want to boot from a floppy disc, to load F12 from the cd images stored on the usb hard drive. Now with Redhat 9 you could use a floppy drive to do just this. However, F12, does not support it.
Is there a work-around that I could try. I have already tried Smart Boot Manager, but it won't detect the usb cd-rom drive. I have Redhat 9 installed on the laptop, and can mount the usb hard drive from terminal. Could I start the install process from here with the images stored on the external drive??Is there anything I can do, or am I doomed to never get past this.
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Feb 19, 2010
I am trying to write a floppy boot image to my floppy drive (as root):
Code:
dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0
dd: opening `/dev/fd0': Read-only file system
[code]....
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Dec 13, 2009
Is there something weird about the FLOPPY DRIVE on F12? Nothing associated with it works & I can't get an icon for it. Also the FLOPPY FORMATTER no longer works. (mine is an internal drive)- I had some really miner quirks with it in 10 but it worked. I had some workaround launchers that I used until an upgrade semi-fixed it. (It would give a false error that it couldn't run but did. I just ignored it.)
I tried to edit FSTAB to cure a problem of my BACKUP drive showing up twice*** so while I was in there I added the stuff for the floppy & it still doesn't work. If I try to mount it manually, I get the error that /dev/fd0 doesn't exist.I tried to find some info on it & it SEEMS that there MAY be a bug but I'm not sure as the info is a bit confusing as to just what version & such they are talking about. And there was also the problem that all the stuff seemed to be OLD or not related to my problem.I why I quite hacking at my system, is that all my workaround launchers & the formatter say that there are GNOME things missing & they can't run. So I figure that there is something missing or screwy already & that I'd better ask BEFORE I make things worse or actually break something.With the fact that floppies are about gone, it's getting to be not that big of a deal but I still find myself having to use them for repair purposes (albeit, not as much) & it gets to be a bit of a pain to fire up M$ just to do something like this.
*** It appears that the one in FSTAB was the one I needed, so where would the OTHER one be so I can get rid of it? Or at least make it auto mount.
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Sep 21, 2010
My computer doesn't support booting from a cd or a usb stick. I managed to install ubuntu (10.04) by using the utility program that came with the live cd. With it I was able to boot from cd and use the live cd., there still seems to be some leftover files of windows in the hard drive where I installed ubuntu. So my question is, how can I reinstall ubuntu so that it will format the whole drive. Is there perhaps a similar utility program for ubuntu that lets me boot from a live cd or can I do the reinstallation just using the already installed ubuntu?
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Mar 17, 2010
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 on a Compaq Evo N200. The problem is that it doesn't have a CD drive on board, and it only supports booting from USB floppy drives- not USB flash or CD drives. I have access to a flash drive, floppy drive and CD drive, all USB externals. I've tried a couple different floppy boot loaders with little success. I understand that it also supports network boot, so this might be an option. What is the easiest way to get UNR running on this laptop?
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Oct 2, 2009
I was wondering if anyone has a floppy image, or something similar that can help me boot my USB.My plan is to have Fedora LiveUSB on my USB... and whenever I need to help someone, or have to use a computer, I can easily pop in my usb, and run Fedora. One problem I've had is that some of my friends have older pcs, and also some of the computers at college are older.I heard that it is possible to force a usb to boot on a motherboard that doesn't support usb boot. I think it has something to do with installing grub on the floppy, and somehow making it install or run usb drivers. (Not entirely sure)One alternative to this that I came up with was to use one of those business card CD's, but apparently the size is too small(at least in the one's I've seen). Not only that, but I can't find them anywhere.
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Apr 13, 2011
I going to re-install Fedora 14 and several other OS-es on a multi boot system.
Now - my normal procedure is to install fedora 14 last and use the grub boot loader to load the other OS. As I use a hard disk to regularly install an experimental OS I keep my grub boot on a back-up floppy. The installation is done (as root) in this way:
modprobe floppy
fdformat /dev/fd0
mke2fs /dev/fd0
mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt/floppy '(fd0)'
cp /boot/grub/grub.conf /mnt/floppy/boot/grub/grub.conf
umount /mnt/floppy
This works great. If your mbr is overwritten by another OS you can use the boot floppy to get into Fedora - no problem.
However - my new system has no longer a floppy disk drive (no connection the motherboard). I wonder if can use a USB stick in stead of a floppy to boot Fedora if my mbr is overwritten. I only have no clue how to do that. The above procedure can obviously not be used, because a stick is no floppy.
I am NOT asking for a full Fedora on the stick!!! I only want t use the stick to boot my hard drive based Fedora if the mbr is overwritten.
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Jul 8, 2011
I already download Fedora 15 from website As ISO Image , How I can create Bootable CD Image? and it possible but it in USB as bootable
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Jul 12, 2011
I installed Fedora 15 on a primary partition and expected the install to create a partition boot sector, but it didn't. Did I do something wrong or is this not supported?
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Jul 29, 2009
to access my floppy from Fedora 11. It is mounted automatically,but when i try to open it by double-clicking, I just get "already mounted" message.I need to retrieve my old menu.lst which is on the floppy. It will then need to be edited to include Fedora.
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Aug 19, 2009
I have and old IBM notebook which I use for work (due to the serial port), and I would like to install FC11 on it, the problem that it doesn't offer to boot from neither CDROM (since it doesn't have a built-in one) nor from USB. However, I have external DVD device witch connect through USB, and I have the notebook bootable floppy desk, how can I install FC11 using those?
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Sep 5, 2010
how to install Fedora 13 on my IBM X40 laptop which does not have a CD, a Floppy, a Network or a working USB. The only way I can write data on its hard disk is by removing it and connecting it via a USB rack to another laptop which runs Windows 7 64bit.
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Dec 20, 2010
I have Fedora 13 and XP installed on my laptop. Right now it only boots to XP but I have a Fedora Live CD so is there some way I can use the live cd to boot into Fedora and edit or install grub to show up at boot?
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Sep 23, 2009
I am having a Promise TX4650 RAID controller & trying to create a driver floppy for installing the drivers. Also am using RHEL 5, I can create the driver floppy, but when I type "mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy" I get error: "mount: mount point /media/floppy does not exist".Can I get the files in a format other than the ext2 floppy image, so that we do not need to use a floppy drive?There is a readme file inside the driver archive & you can use that as a reference.
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Jun 7, 2009
error message:Unable to scan Floppy Drive for media changes Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.
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Mar 12, 2011
I have several (small) bootable linux distros on USB sticks, and I would like to use them on several computers, some of which do not have USB boot support. Many of these also do not have a CD drive.In order to get around this problem I would like to create a bootable floppy disk that can load the system from the USB stick (similar to http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i.../Boot_Floppies). I have found quite a few floppy images on the internet (like the one above), but I haven't yet got one that works and boots the USB sticks that I have (i.e. one that can boot Tiny Core).Is this actually possible (it seems to be, but I haven't got it to work yet) and does anyone know how I can do it?
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Mar 22, 2011
I have an old laptop I'd like to try Bodhi linux on from a usb stick. I've got it installed running on a newer laptop so I know the usb install works. I've searched considerably & haven't found the dummy version of how to boot any distro on usb from a floppy. I have used a DSL floppy to boot Damn small on usb. Is there an easy way to boot Bodhi or any other linux distro that is on usb using the same floppy? I type dsl fromusb to get damnsmall to run. Bodhi fromusb doesn't work.
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Mar 13, 2010
I have an external 500gb usb drive with a bootable full install of slackware 12.2, and it also contains all the sets, patches, and extras for 12.2 in /usr/src, along with some other non slackware packages, like gparted, and I use it for rescue, backup, installation, etc.I used this disk with no errors, setting up 12.2 on my mother's dell, a pentium 4.However, my mom has an older gateway as well (a pentium 2) that she keeps around because it has M$ Publisher on it, and sometimes a student emails her a Publisher document, and she has to use her old sluggish beast to open it up.
I have not found an open source solution to open Publisher docs in Linux, so I have been trying to follow http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Migrate_Windows to migrate the her xp installation on her old box to a vdi to use with virtualbox.My first obstacle is that the cd drive in the old machine is non-functioning. My second obstacle is that her machine dates back to the days before the bios supported booting from usb.
I have never had the time to mess with network booting, and don't know how to set up a bootp server, so sticking with what I know, I thought I could install lilo on a floppy, and have it configured to boot my external usb. Originally, lilo was installed on the mbr of the usb, but for this project, I went ahead, using the pentium 4, and reinstalled the lilo boot loader on a floppy. I did this by mounting my external usb drive (which shows up as /dev/sda) and then binding /sys, /proc, and /dev to it, and chrooting into the external usb install. Then I modified lilo.conf and reran lilo. It worked, and now the external hard drive only boots on the pentium 4 when I have the floppy inserted into /dev/fd0. However, when I plug the external drive into the pentium 2's usb, and insert the floppy and try to boot, it never makes it to the lilo prompt, and just displays 10 lines of L 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07 07..The boot order is correctly set in bios to try the floppy first. I thought I might have problems with the smp kernel on such an old system, and thought I might have to go back to huge.s, but I'm not even making it to the prompt...
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Sep 20, 2010
I have a number of legacy pcs upon which I would like to install Lubuntu. None have CDROM drives, but they do have floppy drives. None can natively boot from USB devices. My goal is to boot into Grub2 from a floppy with USB support, but I'm having trouble making the floppy. I've seen recommended a few times a command string something like
Code:
grub-mkrescue --overlay=/boot/grub --image-type=floppy GRUB2.img
dd if=GRUB2.img of=/dev/fd0
But when I go to do this, grub-mkrescue has no --overlay nor --image-type option. My man grub-mkrescue page only lists --modules and --output as options. I have managed to make a floppy using the commands
Code:
grub-mkrescue --output=FILE
dd if=FILE of=/dev/fd0
This disk does boot into Grub2. The problem with this is that I need to add other files to the disk to have USB functionality in Grub2, but this process writes to the floppy in iso9660 format, which mounts as read-only. I have tried to go this route using the mount -o remount option to try to make the fs rewritable, but I also haven't been successful with that (and I think my limited knowledge is restricting me here).
Maybe I can add the correct files to the file output by grub-mkrescue --output before I write it to the floppy, but I also don't know how to do that.
Basically, I'm a little burned out and looking for some direction. Am I going about this wrong? When I try and follow other people's guides, they seem to have options available to them that I don't have. I'm doing all this from my Lubuntu 10.04 live CD, but have found similar things on my regular Ubuntu 10.04 install as well.
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Apr 4, 2011
I am trying to flash my bios but they only supply an exe or a floppy image. obviosly I am not running windows to run the exe and I dont have a floppy drive. So I have been trying to copy the floppy image to a cd with little success.Size of boot image is 2884 sectors -> genisoimage: Error - boot image 'F1B.IMG' has not an allowable size.The way I understand it thats 4 sectors over the 1.44Mb floppy size? Is there a way I continue anyway? Seeing that I will be putting it on a cd I cant see that the size is going to matter
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Jan 14, 2010
I've installed RHEL 5.3 on a Dell Desktop. I don't want to install GRUB to the MBR. Is there a way to boot up RHEL from a floppy?I've installed GRUB on to a floppy but not having much luck starting up RHEL. In the past Slackware has allowed me to startup the kernel from a floppy using LILO. I was hoping that there is way for RHEL too.
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Apr 25, 2010
I have problem with my laptop Samsung VM7000. The BIOS has a password on which I don't know. It has no HDD and the CD-ROM is damaged. I have a FDD floppy drive and two USB slots, they work (tested). To remove password I tried this http://dogber1.blogspot.com/2009/05/...ered-bios.html but it didn't work.Then I've found a Linux based password cracker http://www.pccmos.com/ but, since my cd drive is dead, I can't launch it. I can write it on a flashdrive, but my laptop is not booting from flash, so I have to make a floppy-boot-disc to boot flash via floppy, but how?
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Jan 20, 2010
I'm trying to upgrade the BIOS in a Dell Dimension 4300. I found the latest BIOS on the dell support site: version A06. The currently installed BIOS is A02.I installed a 2.0 GHz Celeron -128kb L2, 400Mhz fsb. I looked it up and the mobo supports any 400 Mhz, socket 478 processor. The current BIOS shows the cpu as 00 Mhz, 256k. I read somewhere that the BIOS doesn't have the ability to display "128 kb". The BIOS setup is functioning fine other than this and it ran PartedMagic (live CD).
But it won't boot the floppy with the BIOS upgrade. I've tried 9 different floppy drives that were pulled from working systems. The green LED on the floppy drives all lit up. I tried turning the IDE channels to OFF. I tried changing the boot order. I tried unplugging the IDE cables from the mobo. I tried hitting F12 to bring up the boot selection screen and then pressing "2." to boot to floppy. I tried multiple combinations of these
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Sep 29, 2010
OS: Windows XP
Virtual Machine: Bochs-2.4.5
I want to learn some details about linux booting, so I begin writing a small boot program myself. Yesterday, I was writing a small boot program and planned to use it boot a Bochs virtual machine. The boot program is written in assembly language and compiled with nasm.I use bxiamge.exe in Bochs and create an floppy image called boot.img and configure the Bochs virtual host to boot from this floppy image. My question is how to write the compiled boot.bin program into the floppy image(boot.img)?
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May 4, 2010
I scored a Dell poweredge 6300 from a local pawn shop. It has the capability to boot from cd-rom, but apparently not with isolinux, which is what the debian installer cd uses. I was able to boot to UBCD411 (Ultimate Boot CD, which uses syslinux), but didn't see any option to boot to a CD (maybe I'm missing something here?). I tried using the boot floppy from this site. I didn't expect it to work (it's from the Woody era), and it did not. I got a message that says SYSLINUX ver.XXXX CBIOS boot failed. I went to [URL].. and looked for a boot floppy image for Lenny, but apparently it doesn't exist. I did however find the boot floppy image for Etch.
To be honest, even if I did find the Lenny floppy boot image, I'm not sure how to use it to point the system to the installer CD. So, I have two questions:
1) Does anyone know of a boot floppy image for Lenny, or if I could use the Etch boot floppy image?
2) How would one boot from floppy, then point the system to the installer CD?
System info:
(4) Xeon Pentium 2 processors 500 Mhz
(6) UltraSCSI hard drives
(1) SCSI cd-rom drive
(1) SCSI dvd-rom drive
(1) Floppy drive
(1) 10/100 NIC
I'm open to any other suggestions as to how I could install Debian Lenny on this machine.
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Feb 18, 2011
I want to boot Slitaz on an old laptop that can't boot from the CD drive, so I need a boot floppy which can in turn boot from the CD.Over on http://slitaz.org/en/get/ there is a link to download the floppy-grub4dos boot disk, but the link is broken. Is there an alternate source for this disk?
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Nov 15, 2009
Slackware 12.2 has the unkind habit of deleting all the /dev/fd?u* floppy special files upon boot-up. I have to make another directory (I use /floppy) to contain these files so I don't have to keep copying them from an earlier distribution (12.1) Now, for example, to format a 1743 kilobyte floppy, I do fdformat /floppy/fd0u1743 mformat a:If I copy these special files to /dev (where they belong) then some part of Slackware Linux 12.2 deletes the special files when I power down and power up the machine.Slackware 12.1 and earlier leave floppy special files severely alone upon shutdown/startup.I cannot seem to "grep" a reference to /dev/fd anywhere in /etc/rc.d or its subdirectories. Why is Slackware 12.2 deleting them?
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Mar 15, 2011
Situation- Laptop (2003 made Toshiba 2410) with dead secondary controller, so no CDDVD drive, BIOS does not support any form of booting from USB. Laptop has working floppy (had to repair it) distros that are good for older units like that that also support booting from diskettes, and then can mount and install from a USB CDDVD rom drive.
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