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Creating a bootable image...

Posted: Tue Jul 25, 2006 3:53 am
by kenneth_phough
I wrote my FAT12 bootsector and want to test it but found out that my SuSE Linux, for some reason, doesn't acknowlege my external USB floppy drive (I hope its not because I put an Apple sitcker on it :) ), so I decided to make a floppy image with bximage and use fdisk to format it w/ FAT12.
80 clusters
18 sectors per track.
so I can run it with bochs. But now I can't seem to write my FAT12 boot sector to the image. I can't mount it; used wine and ran PARTCOPY but that didn't work either.
Finally I used dd as follows:

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dd if=boot.bin of=a.img bs=512 count=1
And checked it with fdisk

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fdisk -l a.img
it didn't show the partition table so I'm starting to wonder if its not a FAT12 formated floppy image anymore.
How can I write my fat12 boot sector to my floppy?

Posted: Wed Jul 26, 2006 1:13 pm
by joke
i used to do the following :

fdformat /dev/fdx (where x is your drive number, look at /etc/fstab)
mkfs -t msdos -m 0 /dev/fdx 1440 (-t may also take fat12, not sure, and i'm not sure about 1440 either, look at the man pages)
then a simple dd if=<your bootimage> of=/dev/fdx (again x=your drive)

it works with me, although i just format and dd :D

Hope it helps!