Linux News Blog: How to create an ubuntu 8.04.1 boot floppy

Thursday, September 11, 2008

How to create an ubuntu 8.04.1 boot floppy

There are various posts about this topic already, but none of them actually worked for me using a new Ubuntu 8.04.1 installation.

For reference, my computer is setup like this:
Windows Xp installed on an IDE drive /dev/hda using whole disk
Ubuntu 8.04.1 installed on SATA drive /dev/sda using whole disk
Kubuntu 8.04.1 installed on SATA drive /dev/sdb using whole disk

If the BIOS are set to an IDE boot I get windows. If the BIOS are set to SCSI boot I boot into GRUB on the MBR of the primary SATA disk. This is how I have the BIOS set for the remainder of this post (to boot to GRUB on the MBR of a SATA disk). If I change the BIOS boot order it breaks GRUB, I think because the disks get assigned in a different order (hd2,0) becomes (hd0,0) etc. (this is annoying….)

Once booted into Ubuntu I wanted to make a backup floppy boot disk just in case something ever happened to the Linux install. I followed various posts I could find on the internet but none actually worked. Below is what finally did work for me:

1. Open a terminal window
2. $ su and enter password to become the root ’super user’
3. # gformat –device=/dev/fd0

Set format type to DOS in the GUI application, for some reason whenever I tried to format these to Linux ext2 the floppy could not be used in later steps. I can’t explain this. The command line “fdformat” also would not make usable floppies. However, once you have a usable blank formatted floppy:

4. # mke2fs /dev/fd0
5. # mount /dev/fd0 /media/floppy
6. # mkdir -p /media/floppy/boot/grub
7. # cd /boot/grub
8. # cp * /media/floppy/boot/grub

Note I copied ALL files, not just stage1, stage2, menu.lst and device.map files like some other posts suggested. The resulting floppy would not fully work for me unless I copied ALL files.

9. # umount /dev/fd0
10. # grub
11. grub> device (fd0) /dev/fd0

Note the need for the 2nd parameter, device (fd0) would not work

12. grub> root (fd0)

Ignore the message about not recognizing the partiton header.

13. grub> setup (fd0)
14. grub> quit
15. # exit
16. $ exit

The floppy you just wrote should now be bootable and have the entire GRUB menu on it (and actually working). Make sure your BIOS are set to try a floppy boot before the hard disk boot to test the boot loader floppy.