[DRAFT]Floppy Disk Tools for Linux Installations
Motivation
As a result of increasing file sizes and the decreasing cost of optical and flash media, the floppy disk drive has become obsolete on modern computer hardware. With the disappearance of the floppy disk, support for a floppy disk-booted installation of GNU/Linux distributions is disappearing as well. Some distributions, notably Debian, still provide official support for floppy disk-initiated installations, though no major distribution supports delivery of the entire system on floppy disks.
Floppy disk-based tools are still important for the RULE project. Resource-constrained computers are, often enough, older computers. RULE's target systems include those that can only boot from hard disk or floppy disk.
The floppy disk tools considered here fall into two categories. The first category includes boot loaders such as Smart Boot Manager. These tools are used to boot a computer system, and can often be used to boot off of a medium that is not supported by the computer's BIOS. The other category are floppy disk-based small GNU/Linux systems. These small operating systems can be used to carry out basic setup tasks on a computer, such as creating a hard disk partition, formatting it and downloading a network-based installer or installation image.
This article discusses several such tools. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. Still, they can be used singly or in combination to start an installation for many computers that do not meet the requirements of a CD-based installation system. The enthusiast intent on performing the installation of a recent, actively-supported GNU/Linux distribution on an older computer needs patience and perseverance. No one tool may be sufficient to successfully start the installation, but a combination of several of them will often do the trick.
Contents
Further sections of this article can be reached from the links in the list below.
- Required Equipment, Tools and Materials
- Procedures
- Preparing Floppy Disks
- Writing Image Files to Floppy Disks
- Smart Boot Manager
- GRUB Legacy
- Tomsrtbt
- RAMF
- Nanolinux
- Useful Links
- Conclusions
Required Equipment, Tools and Materials
- An Internet-connected computer running either Windows or a GNU/Linux distribution. The instructions in this article were tested under Windows 98, first edition, and Debian-i386 v4.0r1.
- As many good quality floppy disks as you will need to create the tools disks, and then some. Creating floppy disk tools is inherently rough on the disks, and disk errors cannot be tolerated. Some of the floppy disks will probably have hard errors, and cannot be used for creating tools disks.
Procedures
The next two subsections discuss general procedures for preparing floppy disk tools. The following five subsections describe five different tools.
Preparing Floppy Disks
Floppy disks for the disk tools can be prepared under both GNU/Linux and Windows. (It may also be possible to prepare them on a floppy disk-equipped Macintosh or other computer/operating system combination, but these procedures were tested only under Debian GNU/Linux and Windows 98 on an IBM-compatible PC). The reason for doing this step is to establish the logical format of the disk, and to insure that the floppy disk is in good physical condition. Note that some of these tools make use of a higher density format of the floppy disk than the standard 1440 kB. This is done to increase its storage capacity. This raises some issues:
- This technique may not be usable on some systems, particularly older ones, due to limitations of the floppy drive mechanism.
- This technique is more demanding of the floppy disk media, and a disk that works at a standard format of 1440 kB may still fail at a higher density.
- DOS and Windows 95/98/Me can format floppy disks at densities higher than 1.44 MB. Windows 2000/XP/Vista cannot. This is a limitation of the floppy disk driver under the latter operating systems.
Preparing a floppy disk under GNU/Linux is most easily accomplished at the command line. Assuming that the target floppy drive is the first one recognized by the system, it is accessed as /dev/fd0. To format a floppy disk, issue this command (depending on your system, you may have to assume root authority using su or sudo):
cdrigby@fess:~$ fdformat /dev/fd0
If the disk is in good physical condition, the operating system will respond with the following trace of the format operation:
Double-sided, 80 tracks, 18 sec/track. Total capacity 1440 kB.
Formatting ... done
Verifying ... done
cdrigby@fess:~$
Note that GNU/Linux verifes the disk as part of the process. Also keep in mind that, unlike DOS or Windows, GNU/Linux does not place a file system on the floppy disk as part of formatting. For our purposes, the distinction is not important. The image files carry their own file systems.
Preparing a floppy disk under Windows 98 can be done either at the command prompt or with the tools of the graphical desktop. The procedure for DOS is essentially the same as the procedure for the Windows command prompt.
At the command prompt, issue the command:
format a:
The DOS version of the format command defaults to performing a verifcation of the format. Observe the output of this command. An error-free disk will report 1,457,664 bytes available. If there are bad blocks, the floppy disk should be discarded.
Using the graphical desktop interface, double-click on "My Computer" then secondary-click on your floppy drive and chose "Format..." from the pop-up context menu. Select the radio button for a full format, and click "OK" to start. Again, observe the output of the command to make sure there are no bad blocks on the disk. Discard any disks that fail.
Writing Image Files to Floppy Disks
Under GNU/Linux, image files can be written using the command dd. To use it to write an image file to a floppy, issue it at the command line:
cdrigby@fess:~$ dd if=image_file.img of=/dev/fd0
The argument that begins with "if=" specifies the input file. The example above would take as input the file image_file.img in the current directory. The argument "of=" specifies the output file, which in this case is the device that represents the first floppy drive in the system. Other arguments are often used. Some specific examples will be given in the descriptions of particular floppy disk tools, below.
Under Windows 98, image files can be written to disk using the graphical tool RawWriteWin.