boot floppy creation

[Ron Peterson]

Is there a simple generic method of producing a boot floppy for a
particular machine?

The machine I'd like to do this for happens to be a RH installation, but
it's a vendor install, and vmlinuz is not in /boot, so mkbootdisk
doesn't work.

I can always just download the boot floppy image from the vendor.  But
just for my own edification, I'd like to know, generically, how to make
one from scratch.

Suse's site had the following instructions for producing a boot diskette
w/out LILO:

/sbin/badblocks -v /dev/fd0 1440
dd if=Your_Kernel of=/dev/fd0 bs=18k
rdev /dev/fd0 your_root_partition
rdev -R /dev/fd0 1

This presumes the kernel isn't needing any additional parameters at boot
time.  I.E. - a monolithic kernel, right?

What do you do if the kernel *does* require boot-time parameters?  Where
do I look to find them on my particular system?

I see 'mkbootdisk' is just a bash script, so I guess I can read that,
too.

________________________
Ron Peterson
rpeterson at yellowbank.com
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