Re: 720k boot disk

Hans Lermen (lermen@elserv.ffm.fgan.de)
Fri, 10 May 1996 14:06:38 +0200 (MET DST)


On Wed, 8 May 1996, Steven N. Hirsch wrote:

> > > BTW, doesn anyone know if I can cat a kernel image (Linux
> > > 1.3.98) to a 3.5" double-density (720k) floppy yet, or must I be
> > > forced to use LILO?
> >
> > Just give it a try!
> > I regularilly use dd if=/zImage of=/dev/fd0 bs=10k
> > It works flawlessly.
>
> That's interesting. Is it strictly necessary to use dd with bs=10K? At
> one point in the past, I was able to do this by
>
> cp zImage /dev/fd0
>
> However, the last time I tried it I was utterly unable to produce a
> working boot disk. The above works fine on a 1.44M disk, BTW.

I posted the answer a week ago, seems the mail got lost:

720K raw-floppy boot will not work, because the setup.S has become too
big (9 sectors) and bootsect + setup.S must fit into track 0 head 0.
(720K floppies have only 9 sectors per track).

Hans
<lermen@elserv.ffm.fgan.de>