Bug 80571

Summary: Created boot Floppy disk incorrect
Product: [Retired] Red Hat Linux Reporter: Hans Oeste <hoeste>
Component: syslinuxAssignee: Matt Wilson <msw>
Status: CLOSED WORKSFORME QA Contact: Brock Organ <borgan>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 9   
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Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2003-10-16 18:53:04 UTC Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Hans Oeste 2002-12-28 02:55:11 UTC 
From Bugzilla Helper:
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Description of problem:
I've got XP Pro on /dev/hda and already had to repair it once because of grub,
so I decieded to to use a boot floppy to start this installaion.  Only the boot
disk loads vmlinuz fist and then initrd which is backwards so the root
installation on /dev/hdb2 never runs/loads.

I've tried editing the syslinux.cfg file on the boot disk to no avail.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Didn't try


Additional info:
Comment 1 Hans Oeste 2002-12-28 19:28:42 UTC 
Did some more investigation by downlaoding the latest version and version 1.65
of syslinux and creating bootdisk for each version.  It didn't work.  So
syslinux must handle initrd transparently in version 2.00.  The last line in the
boot up process is:

RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0

and there she hangs.  So it must be the image.  I think....  I've tried giving
it the root param on the command line and it didn't help.  At this point I'm at
a loss.  This behavior is with both versions of syslinux.
Comment 2 Bill Nottingham 2003-01-01 04:43:31 UTC 
Is your floppy full?
Comment 3 Hans Oeste 2003-01-02 02:21:54 UTC 
Not quite, 512 bytes free.
Comment 4 Hans Oeste 2003-01-11 23:11:06 UTC 
Done some more work on this little thing.

In a dos box in XP with the flopy disk in drive a: and the CD1 mounted I went

rdev a:\vmlinuz  3 67

This was done from the dosutils directory and used the parameters for that 
partion since my root partion for Linux is /dev/hdb3.

On booting it worked until the point where it is trying to mount the root 
filesystem.  It becomes apparent that it's trying to use resierfs instead of 
ext3 for the filesystem driver.

I thought that the Redhat default filesystem was to format as ext3.  So why 
does the floppy have the resierfs filesystem driver compiled in?  Could someone 
at RedHat create a bootdisk that has the ext3 filesystem driver compiled in?
Comment 5 Matt Wilson 2003-02-11 06:09:26 UTC 
don't use rdev on your boot disk.

lots of this changed lately - try everything again in the next beta