Re: Building a simple boot floppy gets complex FAST in 1.3.

Lauri Tischler (ltischler@fipower.fi)
Wed, 20 Mar 1996 10:08:34 GMT +2


Anno Domini 16 Mar 96 at 22:24, Harvey Fishman wrote:

> It ain't me and it ain't memorex so it must be Linux...the second level
> boot loader in 1.3.75 is missing the ball.

I did some testing and found ....
- In version 1.3.74 there was a small patch in floppy.c and then it
broke.

I have few boxes of older 720kb diskettes which I have been using as
kernel boot floppyes.
Now starting with 1.3.74 'make zdisk' produces un-readable 720kb
bootdisk. If I use 1.4mb 'normal' floppy things work ok.

Symptom with 1.3.74 and 1.3.75 is an endless column of registerinfo.

Then in version 1.3.76 there was a patch upon the previous patch in
floppy.c. It did not fix the problem. instead of registerinfo it
now prints an endless column of
0408
0408
0408 ad nauseatum...
....
Again note that the 1440kb bootfloppyes work ok with 1.3.76.
I even tried following, dd if=zImage of=/dev/fd0D720, to force the
disktype but the result was again unbootable 720kb floppy.
In general not a big deal but...

Cheers..

--
Lauri Tischler, Network Admin          Tel: +358-0-47846331 
Finlandia Interface Oy                 Fax: +358-0-47846500
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