Hello!
> > Has anyone had any success in getting GRUB to boot off 1.68 meg media?
>
> If your BIOS can be configured to recognize the geometry, that would
> be possible. Otherwise, impossible.
In fact, there are there way of finding the geometry:
1) Use values hardcoded in the bootsector (BPB)
2) Ask BIOS about the _drive_ geometry
3) Read sectors on the head 0, cylinder 0, until you get an error.
GRUB used to try 3 before trying 2, but it caused problems with
"simulated" floppies from CD's, so now GRUB tries 2 before 3. And BIOS
knows nothing about the real media, it only knows about the drive.
1 in not used in stage1. Although GRUB preserves BPB (boot parameter
block), it doesn't use those values. It can be bogus values, but it would
be nice to have a separate version of stage1 with BPB support for
1) people playing dirty games with floppies.
2) 100% reliable geometry detection on bootable CD's
I would not actually implement this, but other people may want to :-)
Regards,
Pavel Roskin
