Making boot disks in Red Hat 9

Black Sun and said:

Er... what? This is brain-damaged.

? Writing papers only requires OpenOffice or LaTeX, and specialized crap like CAD programs should be available in the school computer labs.

? Are you saying that the x86 you're using can't boot from CD? All x86s made since 1998 have been able to do that. If your computer's so old it can't boot from CD, you need to go dumpster-diving for a newer computer. Seriously; some of the brain-dead rich students at most universities will just throw out their computers when it comes time to move out of the dorms. Failing that, large universities have "surplus sales" every so often, and you should be able to get a ~1999-era PIII-500 desktop that *can* boot from CD for $cheap there. Or go to your university's Linux User Group and say you need a cheap or free computer. LUG members often have spare parts hanging around, and they may even agree to buttemble those spare parts into an x86 for beer and pizza.

Get a raw floppy image of a DOS boot floppy, then dd it to a floppy you've formatted with fdformat. Kind of like so:

0. insert 3.5" floppy disk 1. fdformatdev-fd0 2. if this errors out, the floppy is bad; remove floppy and goto 0. 3. dd if=dosboot.img of=-dev-fd0 bs=18k ( dd = "direct dump" , if=input file , of=output file, bs=block size. The default block size is 512 bytes, which is too small.) 4. Profit!

If you can't find a raw DOS floppy image (try Googling "freedos"), I have one with a number of useful DOS utilities on it. It's 1.1M zipped. I made it before they neutered SYS.COM, and I've kept it around because it's been useful in some odd circumstances. Holler at my e-mail (mind the SPAN TRAP) if you'd like it. I *really* don't know if it'll help you, though.

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL