i made a GRUB image without a floppy ...

[Pype.Clicker]

for all who wonder how they will OS'dev on their floppyless laptop/imac/pda/whatever, here is *one* solution ...

1. have GRUB tools installed on your host system (this should come with /usr/sbin/grub and the stage1, stage2, etc. files ... )
I had my own stage1, etc. files from an archive named grub-0.92-i386-pc.tar.gz

2. create an empty file of 1.44MB with

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head --bytes=1474560 /dev/zero > grubfd.img
mkdir looppoint

3. become super-user and

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mke2fs grubfd.img
mount grubfd.img looppoint/ -o loop -t ext2

4. create looppoint/boot/grub and copy all the files under your reference /boot/grub there ...

5. umount the looppoint
6. create a 'fake-device.map' file in which you will tell

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(fd0) /dev/loop3

7. invoke '/usr/sbin/grub --device-map=fake-device.map'
8. once in the GRUB shell, issue the following commands:

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device (fd0) grubfd.img
root (fd0)
setup (fd0)
quit

and voil?! your grubfd.img should now be bootable under bochs or any other PC emulator

let me know if it works for you ...

[df]

im writing up a tut for the wiki faq on using images on windows/linux/freebsd/macosx.

[Solar]

In the meantime, you might want to point your browser at http://www.pro-pos.org/downloads/grub_disk.zip and download a disk image with GRUB preinstalled.

I'll try to keep that link updated whenever new GRUB releases appear; currently it's 0.94.

[df]

preliminary image thing is up... am busy but it needs expanding..
scroll down the bottom....

http://www.osdev.org/osfaq2/index.php/HomePage

[drizzt]

I use this bash script to create a floppy image with GRUB.

To use this script you need the MTOOLS package and if you allow a user to execute GRUB shell you can create the floppy image without become super-user...

NOTE: first of all you have to configure the GRUB directory (where are the files stage1, stage2 and menu.lst) into the script.



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