From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.4) Gecko/20011126 Netscape6/6.2.1 Description of problem: Sony Vaio does not have an IDE floppy, but the BIOS supports booting from a USB floppy. This works with DOS/Win, but does not with a linux boot disk (made using qmkbootdisk). (I made the boot floppy by moving /dev/fd3 to /dev/fd3.old and creating a soft link to /dev/fd3 from /dev/sda (the USB floppy). Then I ran qmkbootdisk (from the Gnome menu).) Upon restarting the machine, the floppy gets accessed, but the BIOS(?) or bootloader(?) reports "Boot failed." Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Linux 2.4.9-31 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attach USB floppy drive 2. Make boot disk 3. Reboot Actual Results: "Boot failed" Expected Results: regular boot Additional info: This is low priority since I can boot using the CDROM if I ever have to boot using some external medium.
The bootloader is Grub.
Grabbing the bug
I never heard of qmkbootdisk, so I have two questions. First, please run this for me: rpm -qf $(which qmkbootdisk) It should provide the RPM name. Second, does mkbootdisk work? It should take --device argument, so you do not need to rename anything in /dev.
#rpm -qf $(which qmkbootdisk) kdeadmin-2.2.2-3 Oops. You're right about mkbootdisk. I ran #/sbin/mkbootdisk --device /dev/sda 2.4.9-34 which created a floppy boot disk in my USB floppy - at least the floppy drive made noises and mkbootdisk didn't complain. Rebooted. Just after the Sony logo disappeared from the screen at startup I got a Boot failed message. Same as before. Regards, Roy
mkbootdisk calls mkdosfs and syslinux. On a USB floppy, which is a SCSI device, mkdosfs gets wrong geometry, stores it into BIOS parameters area, and confuses syslinux.
USB floppes look like hard disks to mkdosfs. This is probably the most fundamental problem. This is really a USB (SCSI, really) driver problem. mkdosfs and its handling of the geometry is pretty sick. I've had as a backburner project to rewrite mkdosfs from the ground up, but haven't had time.
Created attachment 61345 [details] Possible fix
I have the exact same problem with a sony vaio, trying to boot from a USB floppy. Except I am running redhat V8.0. Can this patch be applied to the 8.0 sources? Or is there a different fix available for 8.0 carl
Red Hat Linux is no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc. If you are still running Red Hat Linux, you are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/. Red Hat apologizes that these issues have not been resolved yet. We do want to make sure that no important bugs slip through the cracks. Please check if this issue is still present in a current Fedora Core release. If so, please change the product and version to match, and check the box indicating that the requested information has been provided. Note that any bug still open against Red Hat Linux on will be closed as 'CANTFIX' on September 30, 2006. Thanks again for your help.
Red Hat Linux is no longer supported by Red Hat, Inc. If you are still running Red Hat Linux, you are strongly advised to upgrade to a current Fedora Core release or Red Hat Enterprise Linux or comparable. Some information on which option may be right for you is available at http://www.redhat.com/rhel/migrate/redhatlinux/. Closing as CANTFIX.