10.7 Boot Floppies

10.7 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.