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Teddy
Asked: 2010-04-30 05:26:07 +0800 CST

How to boot floppy image without floppy drive?

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Suppose I have a 1.44 MB floppy image with, say, a BIOS update, and a server with no floppy drive. How do I boot this image on the server? Without getting a USB floppy drive, that is.

I tried copying the image to a USB drive (raw copy using dd), but it didn't boot, it just said "No kernel" and continued booting on the HD.

floppy boot disk-image

5 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    MEMDISK can do this, but you're on your own if you're not using one of the bootloaders listed in the article.

    • 1

  2. Here is how to use it with LILO:

    $ <install syslinux>
$ sudo cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/memdisk

    Syslinux config file:

    label dos
  kernel memdisk
  append initrd=dosboot.img

    Lilo config file:

    image=/boot/memdisk
  initrd=/boot/dosboot.img
  label=dos
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  3. PXE is a really good way to do stuff like this as well, and it keeps you from having to go into the server room, assuming you have some sort of remote console.

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  4. Freedos has the ability to create floppy images on a USB flash drive. Google around and there are a few how-to's on the subject. It's the method i always use. I'm sure there are more 'direct' methods, but this has always worked for me.

    The beauty of using this method is that is can create a 'propper' bootable DOS partition on your USB drive, which can them have files added in the normal gui (gnome or kde for example). These files will appear on the disk once you boot from it and you can run them just as any other dos executable...

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  5. Using this you should be able to make it bootable, I reckon. I haven't done it before but if the floppy is normally bootable, this should enable you to boot it as well. So just copy the floppy files over instead of the mentioned windows files.

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