Hi, I hope this helps ...
I have an LS-120 drive in my Compaq Presario 1800T running RH 6.2. 6.2
booted fine from a 1.44 MB boot disk. To make a custom
boot disk I removed /dev/fd0, then made this symbolic link
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 Jun 9 16:54 /dev/fd0 -> /dev/hdd
I was then able to read/write a custom kernel onto a 1.44 MB floppy
w/ the usual make config; make bzdisk
To use mtools, I put the following into /etc/mtools.conf (or ~/.mtoolsrc)
(drive a is for 1.44 MB, b for LS-120, both VFAT format):
# Linux floppy drives
drive a: file="/dev/hdd" fat_bits=12 cylinders=80 heads=2 sectors=18
exclusive
drive b: file="/dev/hdd" cylinders=963 heads=8 sectors=32 exclusive
# uncomment the following line to display all file names in lower
# case by default
mtools_lower_case=1
-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Rankin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Scott Grigsby <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2000 8:42 AM
Subject: Re: LS-120 as Linux Boot Device?
>At 10:10 PM 06/25/2000 -0700, Scott Grigsby wrote:
>>
>>
>>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.)
>>
>
>Actually, I think that placing an emergency boot kernel on the Windows
>partition just may be the best answer. I'm already installed, but I need an
>emergency boot system for tape restores and such, and that sounds like a
>good idea. I'll look into it. I can already restore Windows from tape using
>floppies in the LS-120.
>
>It should be possible to do an LS-120 boot someday though. I hope when
>someone masters it, they'll release the details ...
>
>Thanks,
>Jim
>
>
