Boot Floppies
You can also boot the kernel from a floppy disk. Creating a boot floppy can be useful when recovering a Linux system that has no active kernel.
To create a boot floppy, put a freshly formatted floppy disk in the drive, go to the kernel source directory, and run this command:
make bzdisk
Of course, this only works if the size of your bzImage is smaller than the floppy disk capacity.
You may also need to run rdev to set the floppy's default root device. For example, if your root partition is /dev/hda1, use this command:
rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/hda1
Again, boot floppies are primarily useful during a system recovery when there is no active kernel. For testing new kernels, it's far better just to use an advanced boot loader such as GRUB.
Get How Linux Works now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
