On Wednesday September 3 2003 05:39 am, Charlie wrote:
I have done this with a winblows program and still have some disks like this, up to 1.72mb which was very handy at times. I don't know how to achieve this with Mandrake, though have to admit that I have never looked into it either I seem to just write to CD now. In the old days [about 18 months ago] of 8mb RAM and 830mb hard drive it all went onto floppy.
fdutils, includes among other utilities, superformat. But it's only for formatting DOS file system floppy's. Won't work for an ext2 boot floppy. It will format a DOS floppy up to 1992k, but anything over 1600k an the floppy will become increasingly unstable.
The problem with boot floppy's for past year are so is the ever increasing size of the kernel and initrd images. It's also one of the main reasons that the 'rescue' option was added to the 1st and 2nd install CD's. So who needs a boot floppy anyhow? ;)
I looked into fdutils and experimented with floppymeter, superformat. Backing down from the man page example to "superformat /dev/fd0 sect=20 cyl=81" formatted a disk in not too much time (running the command twice, as the first run errors out) and "mkbootdisk" completed without error. However, after about 10 minutes of loading the initrd and kernel images, boot failed with "no setup signature found". The disk read garbage characters in the shell and kde but that might not be unusual for a superformatted floppy.
Using isolinux from the syslinux package, eventually, produced a bootdisk-on-cd.
Rolf
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