4. Make boot floppies

4.1 What floppies to make

To install linuxppc-1999 on the 7248 you need four floppies: One bootfloppy, two ramdisk floppies and a util floppy.

The bootfloppy is the zImage-2.2.10+IDE image found in the install/PREP-CHRP-BeBox/ directory on the CD or a ftp site.
The ramdisk floppies are in the ramdisk.image.gz file found in the install/ directory on the CD or a ftp site, but it would be easier, at least for ms-dos users to download 1.44MB sliced images from this directory over http.
The util floppy image downloaded from this directory over http.

If you use Netscape or another web browser to download the files, you should check that the sizes of the downloaded files are correct. Some versions of Netscape tend to uncompress compressed files, and we want to keep them compressed. This yields especially for the ramdisk.image.gz file.

4.2 How to make the bootfloppies

Use allways errorfree 1.44MB floppies for these images. The commands shown here is for a working linux system. They might work on other unix systems as well. On some systems you may have to be root to write directly to the floppydrive. In those cases, just su root before issuing the commands.

For MS-DOS, you may use the rawrite util. You can download rawrite from several places, for example a RedHat mirror as ftp://ftp.freesoftware.com. More information on how to use rawrite here.

To make the bootfloppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to the directory containing the bootfloppy image and issue the command:

      dd if=zImage-2.2.10+IDE of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync

Label the disk "Boot floppy" or whatever you like.

To make the first ramdisk floppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to the directory containing the ramdisk image, and issue the command:

     dd if=ramdisk1.image of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync

(If you use the ramdisk.image.gz from the CD or a ftp mirror, try dd if=ramdisk.image.gz of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync count=80 )
Label the disk "Ramdisk root floppy (#1)" or whatever you like.

To make the second ramdisk floppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to the directory containing the ramdisk image, and issue the command

     dd if=ramdisk2.image of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync

(If you use the ramdisk.image.gz from the CD or a ftp mirror, try dd if=ramdisk.image.gz of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync skip=80)
Label the disk "Ramdisk floppy #2" or whatever you like.

To make the utils floppy, insert a floppy in the drive, cd to the directory containing the utils image, and issue the command

     dd if=utils.image of=/dev/fd0 bs=36b conv=sync

Label the floppy "Util floppy" or whatever you like.
(If you like to download the util files manually, you can find them here.)

Next Previous Contents