I had to create a single floppy image holding the kernel and initrd of SuSe8.0 distibution. When I boot the computer, it first loads the kernel, and starts loading the initrd. After a short while it halts saying ?Boot Failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.? The floppy image is served by a PXE server, so I am not sure if the problem I am facing has anything to do with ?bad floppy.? Here is the list of commands I went through to create the floppy image: mkdir /tmp/bootDir dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/boot.img bs=512 count=5760 losetup /dev/loop0 /tmp/boot.img mkdosfs /dev/loop0 mount /dev/loop /tmp/bootDir syslinux ?s /dev/loop0 <-- here I add files to /tmp/bootDir. The files addes are the kernel, initrd, message that were a part of bootdisk and modules1 floppy images shipped with SuSe8.0 CD --> umount /tmp/bootDir losetup ?d /dev/loop0 and my syslinux.cfg looks like: -- default linux implicit 1 timeout 60 prompt 1 display message label linux kernel linux append initrd=initrd ramdisk_size=65536 label manual kernel linux append initrd=initrd ramdisk_size=65536 manual 1 -- I am using SysLinux 2.06. I have a chance to try this on a few computers and result does not change. I am wondering if the ramdisk_size is giving me problem. Expending this to the size of the uncompressed initrd didn?t change the result though. Any suggestions? Fet
fetak at comcast.net wrote:> I had to create a single floppy image holding the kernel and initrd of SuSe8.0 distibution. When I boot the computer, it first loads the kernel, and starts loading the initrd. After a short while it halts saying ?Boot Failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.? > > The floppy image is served by a PXE server, so I am not sure if the problem I am facing has anything to do with ?bad floppy.? >a) How big is your ramdisk (in bytes)? b) Please post *all* messages output by PXELINUX. c) What TFTP server are you running, on which platform? -hpa
> a) How big is your ramdisk (in bytes)?uncompressed 4026368 compressed 1225335> b) Please post *all* messages output by PXELINUX. > c) What TFTP server are you running, on which platform?I am not using PXELINUX. Since I have to use a Windows based PXE server, I chose to created a 2.88MB floppy image to be served by the PXE server. Fet
fetak at comcast.net wrote:> Well, you might be surprised that what I am doing works on RedHat 8.0 which was another Linux distribution I had to try out. > > Having trouble on a SuSe distribution makes me wonder if that is SuSe related problem.It's not. It's pure random chance... whatever NBP you're using sticks the disk image in high memory, and if you're lucky it won't get overwritten during boot; if you're unlucky it will. Note you can use PXELINUX as an NBP just fine with 'doze PXE server. -hpa P.S. Please don't send me off-list replies unless they contain confidential information.