Making a Boot Floppy

From Bootable Cluster CD

Booting up the BCCD using the floppy disk bootstrap method

There are several reasons why you may not be able to boot a computer from the CDROM drive. It could be that the CD image was not created properly (see Burning the BCCD to CD). It could also be that the BIOS is set to boot to other devices first or perhaps you have an older BIOS that isn't capable of booting from the CDROM.

Changing the system's boot-up order through the BIOS

If you have a workstation that will not boot from the CDROM drive, first see if you can change the boot-up order through the BIOS. Most computers have some key stroke that you can press to cause the system to enter the BIOS utility when the system is powered on. Typically pressing DEL, F1, or F2 will work. If no magic incantation of finger combination seems to work, pay close attention to the POST messages. The BIOS should display information on how to enter the BIOS on the POST screen (if your system starts up with a graphical splash screen, see if pressing TAB clears the splash screen away and gives you boot-up information). The key is to watch the messages provided by the system's POST messages for clues on how to enter the BIOS.

If you are able to modify the boot order, save your changes, exit the BIOS, and try rebooting again.

Booting the BCCD from a floppy image

If the BIOS is password protected or the system is a bit older and doesn't allow booting to the CD-ROM drive, you may still be in luck if you are able to boot to a floppy disk.

You are also in luck that the BCCD image contains all of the tools that you will need to create a bootable floppy image in either Linux or Windows.

Making a bootable floppy image under Linux

In Linux (or other Unix system), you will need sufficient privileges to create the floppy image. That means either you will need root access to the system, sudo privileges for creating floppy images, or user-level / group-level permissions to write to the floppy device.

Mount your cdrom device. Typical ways to do this are mount /cdrom in Debian, and mount /mnt/cdrom under Red Hat. Some Linux distributions will mount your cdrom drive automatically after you place the CD in the drive and close the tray. If you are having trouble mounting the BCCD image, check that you burned the image correctly (see Burning the BCCD to CD). Some other places that you can check would be to look at /etc/fstab for the CD-ROM device location and issue mount to see what directory holds the contents of the mounted CD.

The contents of the mounted CD image should look something like this:

[gray@aplaga]>ls 
CREDITS    autorun.inf   cd11.gif  docopen.exe  putty
TRANS.TBL  bccd.htm      cloop.o   lnx.img      rawrite
archivers  boot.catalog  dev       mnt          singularity

The floppy image that we will need is contained in the file lnx.img. The lnx.img file is a raw floppy disk image, which means that it must be copied byte-by-byte over top of the entire floppy disk, and not just copied to a floppy disk.

Put a floppy disk in the floppy drive of your workstation. The floppy disk does not need to be formatted because this process involves byte-by-byte copying of the lnx.img file to the entire floppy disk.

Change to the cdrom mount directory if you haven't already. Create the bootable floppy disk using the command:

dd if=lnx.img of=/dev/fd0

which creates a data dump of the lnx.img over top of the disk bound to the /dev/fd0 device (i.e., the floppy drive).

Place the disk in your system's floppy and the BCCD cd image in your cdrom drive. If you system boots to the floppy drive, you should be all set.

Making a bootable floppy drive under Windows

When the BCCD cdrom image is placed in your Windows system, a web page will be automatically brought up through the use of the systems autorun.inf facility. In order to navigate the cdrom contents, right-click on the CDROM disk in the "My Computer" view, and select Open. The contents should roughly look like this image:

• The contents of the BCCD cdrom image:

The folder with the tools needed to create a bootable floppy image is named "RAWRITE". Open the RAWRITE folder:

• The contents of the RAWRITE folder:

The application that will generate the raw floppy image is RAWWRITE.EXE, shown above with the penguin icon. Double clicking on the RAWWRITE application brings up a selection menu, where you can use the browse button to select the lnx.img file, shown in the image below as D:\LNX.IMG.

• Select the lnx.img file in the rawwrite menu:

Place a floppy disk in your A: drive (or select the appropriate location for your system), and click WRITE to create the floppy image.

Place the disk in your system's floppy and the BCCD cd image in your cdrom drive. If your system boots to the floppy drive, you should be all set.