5. Make boot floppies

In this chapter we will learn how to make useable boot floppies from files downloaded from the Internet.

5.1. What floppies to make

To install LinuxPPC-2000 Q4 on the 7248 you need three floppies: One bootfloppy, and two ramdisk floppies.

The bootfloppy is a precompiled Linux kernel image called carolina_bootimage_2.2.18_with_fb, and it can be found in the images directory on my homepage.

The ramdisk floppies are in the ramdisk.image.gz file found in the install directory on a LinuxPPC ftp mirror or on the CD. But it would be easier, at least for ms-dos users to download 1.44MB sliced images, also from my images directory over http.

If you use Netscape or another web browser to download the files, you should check that the sizes of the downloaded files are correct. Some versions of Netscape tend to uncompress compressed files, and we want to keep them compressed. This yields especially for the ramdisk.image.gz file(s). If strange freezes or other things happens at boot time, try using another program for downloading the files, like wget or lynx.

5.2. How to make the bootfloppies

Use always errorfree 1.44MB floppies for these images. The commands shown here is for a working Linux system. They might work on other UNIX systems as well. On some systems you may have to be root to write directly to the floppy drive. In those cases, just su root before issuing the commands.

For MS-DOS, you may use the rawrite util. You can download rawrite from several places, for example a RedHat mirror as ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com. More information on how to use rawrite here.

To make the bootfloppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to the directory containing the bootfloppy image and issue the command:

          dd if=carolina_bootimage_2.2.18_with_fb of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync

Label the disk "Boot floppy" or whatever you like.

To make the first ramdisk floppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to the directory containing the ramdisk image, and issue the command:

       dd if=ramdisk-2000-Q4-floppy-image.1 of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync

(If you use the ramdisk.image.gz from the CD or a ftp mirror, try dd if=ramdisk.image.gz of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync count=80 ) Label the disk "Ramdisk root floppy (#1)" or whatever you like.

To make the second ramdisk floppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to the directory containing the ramdisk image, and issue the command

       dd if=ramdisk-2000-Q4-floppy-image.2 of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync

(If you use the ramdisk.image.gz from the CD or a ftp mirror, try dd if=ramdisk.image.gz of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync skip=80) Label the disk "Ramdisk floppy #2" or whatever you like.