Re: [expert] making bootdisk on LS120 drive?

[Civileme]

Alan Shoemaker wrote:

> Civileme....please give me the steps to make a boot disc with my ls-120
> [hda].  I've never been able to, though if I make the boot disc on a
> regular 1.44 floppy drive then the ls-120 [hda] will boot the system
> just fine using it (albeit verrrryy slowly).
>
> Alan

Oooops!

Sorry, I can't give you any steps

I had the system with HDD on /dev/hda, ls120 as /dev/hdc, and cdrom as /dev/hdd
NO FLOPPIES were on the system.  And the BIOS had "not present" for Floppy 1/A

I set the boot as A, C, SCSI in the BIOS

I installed L-M normally using a boot disk I had made to get dos with CD support,
then

e:
cd\dosutils
autoboot

And when it asked if I wanted to make a boot disk, I said "yes"
Freeze

After the next install, I used DOS and rawrite  (DOS saw it as A:) for boot.img, and
I decided it was easier to manufacture boot floppies from a "good" floppy drive.

Normally, I operate with the LS120 defined twice in /etc/fstab, once as /dev/floppy,
and once as /dev/hdc.  Minor modification to the properties of the mount icons seems
to work well enough for mount/umount as a floppy.  I think I have a cartridge around
somewhere. but mostly I use the LS120 for floppy operations because the results
writing on one machine and reading on another still work six months after placing in
service.  I have so many MACs and PCs here which cannot talk to one another (or
sometimes even to themselves) via floppy, that I am persuaded the fall of floppy
drive prices has damaged floppy drive quality.


So what you are looking for specifically might well require some modification of the
source and a recompile...  And of the kernel at that.  Since I now have 7 systems of
16 using LS120s and NO floppies, It might be a project for me once I finish the
migration and training for users here.  (Lot more time-consuming than it looks, and
largely a personnel job.)  On the other hand, it is relatively easy to make a
bootable CD or to use the distro CD as a boot/rescue disk, so maybe not.

And I agree making a boot floppy from an LS120 drive in linux might be beyond the
current software.  Making a bootable LS120 cartridge....  Well plenty of info on
that.

Civileme