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4.2 Booting from Floppy

Booting from Floppy

4.2.1 Making a Boot Floppy

Making a Boot Floppy

If your SPARC system has a floppy drive, you can boot the Red Hat Linux installation program from a floppy diskette. The boot floppy image is located in the images/ directory on your Red Hat CD.

To create the boot floppy, you can use rawrite.exe under MS-DOS (located on your Red Hat Linux/SPARC CD in the dosutils directory), or you can use dd under Linux or Unix. Under MS-DOS, you would enter the following commands (assuming the CD-ROM is drive d:):

d:
cd \images
\dosutils\rawrite.exe

rawrite first asks you for the name of a diskette image; enter boot.img. Then it asks for a diskette drive to write the image to; enter a:.

Under Linux or Unix, mount the CD, change to the directory it is mounted under, and use the following command:

dd if=images/boot.img of=/dev/fd0

Please Note: Do not use /dev/rfd0 under Solaris; it will not work. Use /dev/fd0 instead.

4.2.2 Booting

Booting

Insert the boot diskette, and at the PROM prompt enter boot floppy. You will be presented with a SILO prompt. If you wish to do your install using a ramdisk (it will use about 2M of RAM and is recommended if you have 8M or more of RAM), you can simply press [Enter] at the SILO prompt. If you wish to do an NFS-rooted install, you will need to supply some paramters here. The formula is as follows:

linux nfsroot=nfs.server.IP.address:/path/to/RH/image

For this to work you will need a rarp entry or a bootp entry on your network that will give your SPARC its IP address. This is covered in Section 4.3 below.


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