Bug#548320: Still no boot on different machine & different floppies

[ael]

> A standard floppy is 1.44M, so grub-rescue-floppy.img is too large to fit.
 I was wrong about that :-( It wasn't a ki/kb confusion, but I naively
looked at 
$df -B 1 /floppy/
Filesystem           1B-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/fd0               1457664    317952   1139712  22% /floppy

saw 1457664 & forgot about the formatting overhead. Indeed 1440*1024=1474560, 
so the image does fit. Apologies. I think :-)

*However* I have tried the image on another machine with a different floppy
disk (known to be good: at least it was carrying a file system before without
any errors). 

So different hardware, different floppy drive, different physical disk
with the same result:

GRUB loadingRead Error

Next I dug out a brand new floppy preformatted and tried again. Same result.

I have become suspicious about floppy formats and sizes: with udev, I have 
only /dev/fd0. I have played a little with get/setfdprm from the fdutils
package but is is a very long time since I last thought about floppy formats
and the like.

I assume that dd must write into preformatted sectors on the floppy, and that
the grub-rescue-floppy.img has to fit into those sectors. I am out of time to
look further into this, but it looks as if simply using dd to copy fails.
At least with 3 different floppies of 2 different makes, one brand new.
2 of which previously carried working file systems.