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

[Felix Zielcke]

Am Freitag, den 25.09.2009, 22:36 +0100 schrieb 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 :-)

Though I still don't understand why `ls -h' and also `du -h' display
1,40625 MiB as 1,5M and not 1,4M

Anyway
> *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.

You could also try to install it the normal way with
grub-install --root-directory=/mnt /dev/fd0
But first use mkfs.ext2 /dev/fd0
or maybe use minix or fat, they should take up less space.


-- 
Felix Zielcke
Proud Debian Maintainer