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Making a Boot Floppy for the Lab

Making a Boot Floppy for the Lab
        Windows
        Unix/Linux

You can bring a floppy to lab and make one there, or make one in advance.

We have versions of the instructions for Windows and for Unix.

In both cases, start by inserting a blank (or reusable) floppy into the floppy drive. This floppy disk will be completely erased, so don't use one that contains data you want to keep.

Your browser may try to display the boot image in the browser window if you click on the link below. You can avoid this hassle by explicitly telling your browser to save the link in a file. To download the image in Netscape, shift-click on the link instead of just clicking. I'm not sure about Internet Explorer, but you can probably right-click on the link and choose to save it in a file.

Windows

  1. Download the floppy image.
  2. If you don't already have it, get the rawrite program from ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/current/i386/dosutils/
  3. Use the rawrite program to copy the floppy image to the floppy. (I've never done this, so you're on your own -- check the documentation.)

Unix/Linux

  1. Download the floppy image.
  2. Run the following command (you probably need to be root)
      dd if=boot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

    Where /dev/fd0 is the device file for your floppy drive (this is the correct name for Redhat Linux. It might be different for other OSes).
Part of the CptS 302 Website
Instructor: Geoff Allen , geoff@wsu.edu
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