Floppy Disks
Format, Emergency & Rescue Disks plus DVD's
Format a Floppy Disk
Actually, you want to format the disk, then add a file system.
- Format the disk with fdformat.
- Example: For a 1.44MB disk, in fd0 (windows A: drive)
fdformat /dev/fd0H1440
- Use mkfs to add a filesystem so you can write to the disk.
- Now you can mount the floppy drive and access the disk.
Create an Emergency Boot Disk
- There are two methods to create this disk depending on the kernel type (modular or monolithic). Both are explained below.
- An Emergency Boot Disk is different from a Rescue Disk
- An Emergency Boot Disk starts the system using the kernel which is on the system hard drive. It is similar to Lilo.
- A Rescue Disk is used in conjunction with the Emergency Boot Disk and it contains a working kernel image. It is covered in the next section.
- Most systems will use a kernel that supports loadable modules, known as a Modular Kernel. If you compiled the kernel not to use modules, maybe a firewall or similar device, then use the monolithic section that follows.
- Standard System Emergency Boot Disk
- run mkbootdisk (optionally you can point to a different device ete, but /dev/fd0 is default)
- Monolithic Kernel Boot Disk
- format a disk with fdformat /dev/fd0H1440
- copy the link of the boot image to the raw device with
cp /boot/vmlinuz /dev/fd0H1440 (answering y to override "/dev/fd0H1440")
- confirm the root device (where the root file system is located)
rdev
- set the floppy to use the device as indicated with rdev
rdev /dev/fd0H1440 /dev/hda6 (or whatever from step 3)
- force the root file system to initially be mounted as read-only
rdev -R /dev/fdH1440 1
- You should try booting with the newly created disk, or wait till you really really need it, then test :)
Creating a Rescue Disk
- locate the rescue.img disk image off the install CD-ROM. You may want to copy it to your hard drive, but this is optional.
- cd to the directory with the image
- dd if=rescue.img of=dev/fd0 bs=72k (you may not need to set the block size)
- to test (or use) boot with the Emergency Boot Disk (above) and type "rescue" at the prompt.
You will be prompted for the Rescue Disk.
Create a Data DVD
- gather the files into an ISO9660 image file:
mkisofs -R -o /path/to/cdimagefile.raw <path to file1> <path to file2>
You may want to use -r instead of -R, see the man page for details.
- copy the image to a DVD:
cdrecord /data/temp/cdimage.raw