Hi, I'm sorry to bring this up again but I can't quit get this too work. I'm trying to build a 2.88 floppy image so that I can use PXE to load Ghost. I'm useing the following to get a copy of the bootsector: dd if=/dev/fd0 of=bootblock bs=512 count=1 Then I build the image file with: mformat -C -t 160 -s 18 -h 2 -B bootblock x: Then use mcopy to put the required files into the image. I mount the image on the loop back device and everything looks ok, but when I try to boot a machine from this it just moans "invalid system disk". The disk I am useing for the bootsector and to copy the files from is a working Windows 98 startup disk. Once again thank you for your time, I've spent a couple of days on this and the other bits to get PXE booting to work already, but I'm running out of time to get 30 new bare machines up and running by the end of the holidays. -- Simon Kelsall Network Administrator St James the Great R.C Primary & Nursery School http://www.stjamesthegreat.org/ ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/
bootsector usually does change when converting from 1.44MB to 2.88MB, so that may be a reason it fails. if you have Windows, just use WinImage to load a win98 bootdisk into it, then convert to 2.88MB remove all programs except io.sys/msdos.sys/command.com , defrag the image, then save it and do in Linux whatever you want. (adding files I guess). Syslinux mailinglist had a script for this about a week ago. using Bochs may also be an option, to set A: to the win98 bootdisk, and B: to an empty 2.88MB diskimage (then use "A:\FORMAT B: /S" from within Bochs) due to diskspace reasons, I'm having a 1.44MB bootdisk with Syslinux on it installed. Then the real data is in a Gzip-compressed 2.88MB imagefile that I load using Memdisk. gives me double the diskspace this way, as well as a writable A: (because memdisk is a ramdisk) Bernd
A good solution is to use this image: http://www.fdos.org/ripcord/beta8h02/images/fd288mb.zip Then include the tools you want.. Definitively an easy solution :) I've also made (with a friend of I) a script (maybe it need to be more tested) that allow you to create a 2.88MB bootimage from a 1.44MB floppy :) http://people.mandrakesoft.com/~erwan/make288 -- Erwan Velu Linux Cluster Distribution Project Manager MandrakeSoft 43 rue d'aboukir 75002 Paris Phone Number : +33 (0) 1 40 41 17 94 Fax Number : +33 (0) 1 40 41 92 00 Web site : http://www.mandrakesoft.com OpenPGP key : http://www.mandrakesecure.net/cks/
Thanks for the help guys, I ended up useing a combination of both replys to move things along. The following is mainly for the archives. I used WinImage to save the bootsector of a normal Windows 98 startup disk to a file boot.bin then with drive x: file="/tmp/2880.img" in ~/.mtoolsrc I could mformat -C f 2880 -B boot.bin x: to create the file before I mcopy "the files I need" x: then just copy /tmp/2880.img to the tftpboot directory and I had my bootable 2.88 dos floppy. My only problem now is that when I try and run Ghost it crashs with a GP error :-( but I guess thats for another list. -- Simon Kelsall Network Administrator St James the Great R.C Primary & Nursery School http://www.stjamesthegreat.org/ ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/