I have a Gateway Solo 9100 with an LS-120/floppy disk drive, and I don't
think I ever managed to boot linux from the floppy drive. Granted, I
didn't try very hard to create a custom kernel/boot floppy -- I think
I just ended up booting from my Win98 partition and installing that
way. The problem, it turns out (which I discovered only after I
got linux installed some other way), was that the LS-120 drive shows
up as /dev/hdd (or some other ide (hard drive) device), not as /dev/fd0.
So whenever I tried to boot from the floppy, LILO would try to
load the kernel from /dev/fd0 somewhere, which didn't exist, since
once the driver for the LS-120 disk drive loaded, it became /dev/hdd.
As I said, I think I just ended up booting the kernel from my Win98
partition (zipflop or something like that), and skipping the floppy
drive altogether. Of course, if I'd known that that drive ends up
being /dev/hdd (or some other ide/hard drive device), I might have
had better luck creating a custom boot floppy. I also seem to remember
that the LS-120 drive was detected automatically, I didn't really
need any special drivers. (But I installed this laptop over a year
ago, with RH6.0, I think.)
Hope this helps!
Scott
Jim Rankin wrote:
>Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 17:57:48 -0400
>To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>From: Jim Rankin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: LS-120 as Linux Boot Device?
>
>I've searched high and low for any clue how one can construct a
>satisfactory boot disk for a Linux laptop which has an LS-120 rather than a
>standard floppy. I've also experimented with several different variations,
>and have made sure the kernel in question has LS-120 support compiled in
>directly. In all cases, it fails, either with no response at all at boot,
>or a compressed image error and a system halt, or a lilo sequence that
>starts out
>
>L 01 01 01 01 01 ... (ad infinitem).
>
>This is true if I use a true LS-120 disk rather than a 1.44 MB floppy as well.
>
>Has anyone succeeded at this, or is it still not feasible under current
>Linux releases? I hate to order a standard modular floppy drive if there's
>some other solution.
>
>Thanks,
>Jim
>
