Making a Bootable Rescue Disk

Tim Chase blinux.list at thechases.com
Mon Feb 7 16:50:11 UTC 2005


> What I am not sure about is how to get the type of image I 
> need to put in to that file.

You likely need to use the "dd" command.  If you have a boot
floppy you want to use, you can put it in the drive and do

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/images/boot.img bs=1440k count=1

which will create a file called /images/boot.img which you can
then pass off to your ISO-maker (mkisofs or whatever).
Oftentimes, you'll have such a floppy-disk image on your
distribution media, often in the root of the first disk (or
sometimes buried in a directory of Dos tools for creating a
boot-disk from Dos to boot Linux)

If you have such an image file already and want to create a
floppy, IIRC, you just reverse the parameters of the above
command.  Assuming you've got your image file in /images/boot.img
you can just do

dd if=/images/boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k count=1

and presto, you have a boot disk.  If your boot-disk contains 
more than the standard 1440k, you can modify that number 
accordingly.  Older drives may not have the option to be 2880k, 
so 1440k are pretty standard.  However, newer drives and floppies 
may be able to handle the larger size.

Hope this helps,

-tim








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