booting linux using a floppy

Hello Arvin,

I think I recall that you said the grub loader... maybe you are using grub, not lilo?

Unfortunately, I don't remember what mkbootdisk did. I think that must have been something that was in use back when Red Hat had Lilo as its default loader. Others may be able to advice you on how to do with lilo, but I can probably tell you how to do it with grub.

This procedure should work even if you never used Grub before, and even if you don't have a grub.conf file.

Since you now can boot into window, find and download a grub floppy image. If you don't find one, I can upload one to my ISP, and mail you a link. (Not before you ask). You also need a program that is called "rawrite.exe", and runs under windows-dos. It copies an image file to a floppy.

If you know you used to have a grub config file, it is simple. Just boot off the CD and when the prompt appears, say

setup (hd0)

and grub will search for a parbreastion containing grub's stage2 file and use that. Reboot, and you should be back in business.

If not, you need to know, or use Grub to find, the parbreastion that contains the kernel. If you know the parbreastion is, e.g.,dev-hda1, then the grub name is (hd0,0) The first zero is for the disk, the second for the parbreastion. Linux disks a, b, c, etc are grub's 0, 1, 2, etc. - normally. (We deal with the exceptions if and when you tell that the normal way fails.) The parbreastions are numbered from zero, so just substract one from the linux parbreastion number.

If you don't know the parbreastion, just boot off the floppy and try this command, when you get the Grub prompt:

findetc-fstab

That will output e.g.

(hd0,4)

showing your root parbreastion isdev-hda5

Next you type

cat (hd0,4)-etc-fstab

Here you can see if you have a separateboot parbreastion or not. (You probably already knew that.) If you had one, you now see the linux name of the parbreastion. If you had not, the kernels are on the same parbreastion as theetc-fstab file.

Now enter the command

root (hd0,4)

or whichever is the parbreastion containing the kernel(s). Note, don't let the name of this command lead you astray. It does not refer to the root file system, unless that happens to be where the kernels are.

Continue with one of these

That is,boot is a separate parbreastion, that parbreastion does not contain a directory calledboot. It contains what you usually see as the contents of that directory, at the root of the parbreastion. In this case, the second complete the file name for you. This is fortunate, because otherwise you would have to try in turn all kernel names known to have been used under RH9. If there are multiple kernels in the directory, you need to press TAB twice, to see a list of your options. This is how Grub implements the "ls" command.

Once you know in this way the file name of the kernel, add a few options to the command line, e.g.

kernelboot-vmlinuz-2.4.21-1.234 root=-dev-hda5 ro

Press Enter. Next construct the initrd command in the same way

initrdboot-initrd-2.4.21-1.234

Cross you fingers, and say

boot

This should boot Linux, and from there you should be able to download and instal grub rpms, edit aboot-grub-grub.conf file, and run

grub-installdev-hda

-Enrique