Fedora Users — Re: Making a spare boot up floppy

I agree - there is nothing much to beat a CD booted to rescue mode. I have used them many times in various flavors of RedHat 7.1, 7.3, Advanced Server 2.1 and 3, and always succeeded in repairing problems. Usually stupid ones, like figuring out what files to look out for when restoring a server rebuilt for a DR test - specifically files like fstab, network configs, raidtab, modules.conf, lilo.conf and grub.conf, and of course the one guaranteed to be a problem if you try to restore/copy or in any way overwrite it - /lib/i686/libc-xxx.so. Try overwriting libc sometime and watch the fun - it's sure to end up making it into a zero byte file and panic the kernel, and make the system unbootable.

From: Ben Steeves <bcs@xxxxxxxxxx> Reply-To: bcs@xxxxxxxxxx,For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx> To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: Making a spare boot up floppy Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 22:03:52 -0400
On Sun, 2004-03-28 at 18:42, Jeff Vian wrote:
> The easiest way to make a usable (and bootable) image of a boot floppy
> is with dd.
> Use "dd if=/dev/fd0 of=boot.img bs=512 count=2440" to create the file
> boot.img that is an exact copy of the floppy.
>
> That will create a bootable image of the floppy that then can be put
> back onto another floppy using rawrite from dos/windows, or dd on linux.
Of course... for rescuing a failed/broken Fedora installation, the CD is
actually quite good.  It holds a lot more handy software than a boot
floppy.  I consider floppies to be 'single use' devices... at least for
critical uses.  After being burned (badly) by some "rescue" disks that
couldn't several years back, I have never depended on them again.  CDs
all the way!
> Barry Yu wrote:
> >I want copy all contents in the bootable floppy into my data storage partition, and copy them back into a blank floppy in case I need - I had bad experience in open a blend new box of floppy and 3 consecutive floppy even not workable at all! I must prepare if the current boot floppy one day is gone. Moreever, I really want to know above copy process what have I missed that caused the new floppy not bootable even with correct contents in it (At least I can't see what I had missed). > >Thanks for helping.
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