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Making a grub boot floppy
Having spent ages trying different methods of making a boot floppy and not having much success
I finally found a method and just wish to pass it on.
Please note that I have only tried this with Debian and it may not work with other Linux distro's. The commands used apply specifically to Debian and may differ in other distro's.
Standard Disclaimer; I take no responsibility for the results achieved from the following!
First take a known good floppy and
format it. Using a shell console or from the command line as root do
Assuming that you have a correctly configured grub on your system we can now write it to the floppy by now doing;
Check that the floppy works by rebooting from it. If the boot floppy works then it is job done.
Creating a boot cd from the boot floppy
If you are thinking, why make a boot cd when you already have a floppy then the reason
is that floppies don't tend to be very reliable media in my experience and just when you really
need it, it doesn't work. A cd on the other hand, if stored properly is very reliable. So here's
how to make a boot cd from the floppy
Firstly create a temporary directory in your home directory
Now we need to create an image of the floppy in this directory, so do;
Now we have an image of the floppy disk we can create a boot iso to burn to a cd. If you want to know the technical background then here is a reference. Here are the mechanics. Again from a consol do;
Note the "." on the end of this line it is important
You can now burn the iso file to a cd and you should have a boot cd as well to keep in a safe place
I hope you find the information
useful and enjoy the site. If you have any suggestions or
comments or would like to contact me then please e-mail me
Rob Oats
July 2004
