[ale] homemade bootdisk problems

[beatle at arches.uga.edu (Benjamin Dixon)]

Hi all,

I'm trying to put together a custom-made bootdisk for an embedded project
and have run into trouble. Ultimately I'd like to have the most basic
system plus svgalib on a single floppy so I've been messing with
superformat to get 1.68 to 1.7Mb out of a 1.44Mb floppy. I went through
and followed the instructions in the bootdisk howto and everything went
smoothly. I dd'ed the kernel to the disk, then dd'ed the root image right
behind it. However when I try to boot from the disk, it says  "Loading"
and thne prints periods all the way across the screen and never gets to
decompressing the kernel. However I noticed that if I dd the kernel alone,
it will boot and eventually halt. I get the same behaviour with 2.2.20 and
2.4.18 so I think its just something wrong with my procedure. Has anyone
run into to the "loading.........etc" problem before? What type of error
might that indicate? Has anyone used superformatted floppies for bootdisks
before? So far as I know, it should work.

Ben


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