[gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Tom]

Hi

I had a very un-nice evening, trying to get my system back into a
usable state, which I eventually managed, but that is another story.

It made me realise I need a way to be able to use my cdrom drive to
boot cds.
Let me explain before you say 'huuhh!?'
I bought a new dvdwriter a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I am no
longer able to boot from cd (using that drive, its SATA). It seems its a
bios bug or something, I even contacted the vendor (ASRock) and they
sent me an updated flash image, which I was sofar unable to install,
for some strange obscure reason.(I generally do know how to flash
bioses, and strangely the 'official' bios images from their site work,
just not the one support sent me, they are now offering to send me a
pre-burnt bios chip, but I'm slighly reluctant to go that road...)

So now I'm basically thinking to myself, ok, I have a floppy drive, so
what I need is a floppy disk, with a small kernel and my sata-chipset
driver and some mechanism for then booting of a (bootable)cd lying
ready in my drive.

So, any ideas how to do something like this? Maybe something ready
made, or a convenient script.

Everything I found regarding this, was using 2.3 kernels and were
generally out of date  :(

Tom

Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Albert Hopkins]

Why wast your time with floppies?  Boot from a USB stick that has plenty
of storage on it for kernels and drivers.

Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Neil Bothwick]

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On Thu, 26 Mar 2009 02:32:49 +0100, Tom wrote:

> So, any ideas how to do something like this? Maybe something ready
> made, or a convenient script.

Smart Boot Manager - http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/


-- 
Neil Bothwick

Planet 98% full! Delete Windows users? (Y/y)

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Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Tom]

> Why wast your time with floppies?  Boot from a USB stick that has
> plenty of storage on it for kernels and drivers.

Bios doesn't support it :(

Tom

Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Albert Hopkins]

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 12:54 +0100, Tom wrote:
> > Why wast your time with floppies?  Boot from a USB stick that has
> > plenty of storage on it for kernels and drivers.
> 
> Bios doesn't support it :(
> 

So was this machine manufactured 10 years ago or are you *that* good in
choosing crappy hardware?

Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Michael Sullivan]

On Thu, 2009-03-26 at 02:32 +0100, Tom wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I had a very un-nice evening, trying to get my system back into a
> usable state, which I eventually managed, but that is another story.
> 
> It made me realise I need a way to be able to use my cdrom drive to
> boot cds.
> Let me explain before you say 'huuhh!?'
> I bought a new dvdwriter a couple of weeks ago, and ever since I am no
> longer able to boot from cd (using that drive, its SATA). It seems its a
> bios bug or something, I even contacted the vendor (ASRock) and they
> sent me an updated flash image, which I was sofar unable to install,
> for some strange obscure reason.(I generally do know how to flash
> bioses, and strangely the 'official' bios images from their site work,
> just not the one support sent me, they are now offering to send me a
> pre-burnt bios chip, but I'm slighly reluctant to go that road...)
> 
> So now I'm basically thinking to myself, ok, I have a floppy drive, so
> what I need is a floppy disk, with a small kernel and my sata-chipset
> driver and some mechanism for then booting of a (bootable)cd lying
> ready in my drive.
> 
> So, any ideas how to do something like this? Maybe something ready
> made, or a convenient script.
> 
> Everything I found regarding this, was using 2.3 kernels and were
> generally out of date  :(
> 
> Tom
> 

Smart Boot Manager (http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/)

Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Tom]

> > > Why wast your time with floppies?  Boot from a USB stick that has
> > > plenty of storage on it for kernels and drivers.  
> > 
> > Bios doesn't support it :(
> >   
> 
> So was this machine manufactured 10 years ago or are you *that* good
> in choosing crappy hardware?

I regular y excel in choosing crappy hardware :-;

However, the board does date back to 2004, don't know when it was first
released though.

The bord/bios is actually supposed to boot off sata, just for that to
work I need to set the controller to non-raid mode in the bios.
Doing that upsets my WinXP install, which is also a non-option.

So basically I'm stuck with the 'via floppy' method, which is nice,
reminds me of the 'good old times' ;)

Tom

Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Mick]

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On Thursday 26 March 2009, Tom wrote:

> It seems its a
> bios bug or something, I even contacted the vendor (ASRock) and they
> sent me an updated flash image, which I was sofar unable to install,
> for some strange obscure reason.

Mentioning the obvious just in case ... have you run a checksum on it?  
Perhaps they should email it again to you?
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] Boot via floppy from cdrom

[Tom]

> Mentioning the obvious just in case ... have you run a checksum on
> it? Perhaps they should email it again to you?

No, I just sent them my request. If that was the problem, I'm going to
cry, and pull my hair out ;-)

Thanks...hoping...

Tom