Copying Boot-floopy in Linux

[Agent007]

Hi all,

I have this Win98 boot floppy. Am planning to copy the contents to a CD, so as
to make the CD bootable......Just using the copy command does not work as some
of the stuff is not read while copying. Is there a command which will make a
sector by sector copy the floppy and dump the contents to an ISO image? which I
will later burn onto a CD.

thanks,
007

PS:- I know that there r other bootdisks out there but I need to use the Win98
only

[Stryker]

I'm not sure if it will work or not, but you could try:

# dd if=/dev/fd0 of=/folder/to/save/floppy.iso

and then just burn that image on the CD. Tell me how that works, i'm curious myself.

[ForceSphere]

Ummmm...your tring to make a boot disk for win98 but with Linux?  I dont see how that would benefit you but just try it with plain old Win98, show all files and copy

[ February 05, 2003: Message edited by: Force ]

[Stryker]

quote:Originally posted by Force:
Ummmm...your tring to make a boot disk for win98 but with Linux?  I dont see how that would benefit you but just try it with plain old Win98, show all files and copy

[ February 05, 2003: Message edited by: Force ]

That wouldn't copy the boot sector, and he wants it on a CD.

[Agent007]

Right, i wanna create the win98 bootcd in linux because there may be some tool lying around which would dump the contents of *all* the sectors on the floppy to an ISO image....

Using the copy and paste command will NOT work because the boot sector of the floppy will not get copied to the CD or a folder on the HDD.

Try it out and just copy the contents of a win98 boot floppy to a folder, then recopy the stuff to another floppy and c...It won't work...

007

[Calum]

try using dd to make a disk image as above. this should contain the boot sector and everything. then you can burn that same disk image to a CD in the same way you would a normal iso. the only way i see this falling down is that a floppy might not have the same kind of boot sector that a CD has, also the filesystem on a floppy is not the same as on a CD. in fact that last reason is why i think it probably won't work. You'll have to do a copy/paste of some sort and seperately use whatever CD burning options are required to make the CD bootable in my opinion. and it still might not work depending on whether any of the win98 boot stuff is hard coded to a particular device (not likely but possible).

[beltorak0]

Basic conceptual error abound.

There is no boot-sector format for CD's.  What happens is that the CD-Rom detects a floppy image on the cd that is marked as being an el-torito boot floppy, and the cdrom tricks the bios into believing that floppy image is actually in the floppy drive.  That is called "floppy emulation boot".  A later spec allowed "HD emulation boot" and "no-emulation mode"; but it works the same way.

So no, you can't just copy a floppy image to a f/s, translate it to iso9660, and expect it to boot.  you have to use the "mkisofs -b /path/to/boot_floppy.img" to set the correct flags on that file as being complient with the el-torito boot spec.  "man mkisofs" for more info.

I'm still trying to make a boot cd; the following links might prove useful:
no. 1
no. 2
This one might be a little more germain: but you still need a bootable cdrom/boot disk to make it work.

keep us posted... i think i might have another crack at it this weekend....

[ February 06, 2003: Message edited by: beltorak ]