Creating a Bootable Floppy Disk Linux

There are times when you need to boot a system from something other than the hard drive. Those times are usually described as bad, disasterous or catastrohpic crapout. In any event, you need a floppy disk with a bootable image on it. One of the best and easiest to use is tomsrtbt (tom's root boot), which can be found a number of places, including:

http://www.toms.net/rb/download.html

Depending on how you want to create your disk (Windows or Linux) pick the dos.zip or tar.gz version respectively, and then follow the instructions. For Windows/DOS, you will need rawrite to create the floppy, which is on your RedHat CD under dosutils. Also, you will need to boot into DOS, it won't work under Windows.

For the Linux version, after you download tomsrtbt.tar.gz, you unpack with (assuming version 1.7.361):

tar --gzip -xf tomsrtbt-1.7.361.tar.gz

Go to the tomsrtbt-1.7.361 directory and enter install.s. It will ask for a floppy, format it and then install the disk image. You may have a problem with the format with newer floppy disks. If you get an error and it tried to format 82 tracks, do the following:

setfdprm -p /dev/fd0 1440 9 2 80 0 0x23 0x01 0xdf 0x50m
format /dev/fd0
dd if=tomsrtbt.raw of=/dev/fd0 count=1440

If you boot from this floppy, follow the onscreen instructions and you will eventually be root user on your system. You can access the hardware on your system, including the hard drives. If you have a hard drive with an /boot on hda4 partition that needs some help, you can mount it like this:

Create a directory - e.g. mkdir /mnt/boot
Mount the partition - e.g. mount /dev/hda4 /mnt/boot
Fix your problem with the drive
Unmount - e.g. umount /mnt/boot
Reboot from the hard drive.