Boot floppies of RC1 broken for VAIO laptop

[Rainer Dorsch]

Doug,

I run

silverboxy:/home/rd# dd if=grub-0.97-i486-pc.ext2fs of=/dev/fd0 bs=512 
conv=sync ; sync
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
1474560 bytes transferred in 96.615515 seconds (15262 bytes/sec)
silverboxy:/home/rd#

but the floppy did *not* boot. Is that one in etch broken, or did I do 
something stupid?

I copied on the same floppy super grub-disk sgd_0.9528_english_floppy.img. 
Booting with this one worked well.

Thanks,
Rainer

Am Sonntag, 3. Dezember 2006 02:16 schrieb Douglas Tutty:
> On Sun, Dec 03, 2006 at 12:40:48AM +0100, Rainer Dorsch wrote:
> > > Can it boot a grub-disk floppy?
> > >
> > > Can you burn a CD?  Or, on that nice hdd, make a 256 MB (or 1 GB if its
> > > a large disk) partition.  Put the hd-media and the netinst.iso there
> > > following the long-way instructions for the hd-media.  Boot that
> > > partition and you're away.
> > >
> > > Once things are installed, turn that partition into extra swap.
> >
> > Doug,
> >
> > thanks for the reply. What is a grub-disk? I think all other steps sound
> > promising (I could probably even use the partition used right now as
> > swap).
>
> A grub-disk is from the package grub-disk.  It is a floppy image of, you
> guessed it, a grub-disk.  You can make one without this package on any
> computer that has grub installed by following the directions in the grub
> manual.  The grub-disk image is just dd'd to a fresh floppy from any
> computer where you have dd and the image file, i.e. you don't have to
> have grub installed.
>
> The grub disk itself is just the grub boot loader with a default
> menu.lst that you can alter if you want.  You don't have to choose from
> only the menu, you can enter the grub command line and go from there.
>
> Any boot loader, including grub, looks only at the blocks on a disk.  It
> knows nothing about raid or lvm.  /boot can't be on lvm.  The usual way
> of dealing with this is to have one raid1 partition set for /boot and
> another for lvm.  This way both (all) disks in the raid1 array have the
> same /boot layout.  If you install grub the the MBR on both disks, you
> can boot from either.  You can get really fancy and put a boot line for
> both /boot partitions in each menu.lst, however, my main board bios can
> pop up a boot list where you choose which device to boot so I don't need
> to get fancy.
>
> This is the advantage of grub over lilo; you can change __at_boot_time__
> what you boot and with what parameters (can be password protected).
>
> Doug.

-- 
Rainer Dorsch
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