copy/paste
Making an Installation Boot Diskette
Your installation can also be started using a boot floppy. A boot floppy can be used to support booting the Install CD-ROM on older CD-ROM drives. A boot floppy can also be used to start an install over a network when the PC does not have a CD-ROM drive but has a network interface card (NIC). Boot floppies are created from floppy images (.img files). These images are contained in the images directory on the first Fedora Core CD-ROM.
Fedora Core provides a number of images, as listed in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1 Fedora Boot and Driver Disk Images
Name
Description
boot.iso
CD-ROM boot image supporting single-media network installs
bootdisk.img
Enables booting to an install using all install methods
drvblock.img
Utility image containing various hardware drivers, such as SCSI
drvnet.img
Auxiliary network interface card drivers to support network installs
pcmciadd.img
PCMCIA driver disk with support for SCSI, network, and other adapters
images/pxeboot
Directory containing a PXE-enabled Linux boot kernel and RAM-disk image use to support booting various installs
Most of the images listed in Table 3.1 support booting to an install. The pxeboot directory contains a kernel that supports a remote booting protocol named PXE that enables installation, or upgrades of Fedora Core for network-only PCs. Use of this software requires a properly configured DHCP server and a supported BIOS. Although it might be possible to use a floppy boot disk, this method is not supported by Fedora. Browse to
http://www.compaq.com/products/serve...itepapers.html and read the Compaq white paper titled "Configuring a Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) using Red Hat Linux 7.1 on Compaq ProLiant Servers" to see one way of booting to an install using PXE. Browse to
http://www.europe.redhat.com/documen...mote-Boot.php3 to read how to set up remote boot environments using older versions of Red Hat.
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If your PC's BIOS supports booting from a USB device, you can use a USB floppy drive to boot to an install. It is also possible to boot from an IEEE-1394 (FireWire) CD-ROM if supported by your PC's BIOS.
You can create the boot floppies using the DOS RAWRITE command or the Linux dd command. You'll need one or more blank floppies. Use the RAWRITE command after starting DOS like this:
Follow the prompts to create the images, entering a source filename and a target drive (such as A or B). To get a copy of the latest version of RAWRITE, browse to
http://www.tux.org/pub/dos/rawrite/.
To create a boot diskette while running Linux, use the dd command. The first step is to insert the first Fedora Core CD-ROM and to make sure that it is mounted:
Kode
$ df
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda2 18714368 10410280 7353444 59% /
/dev/hda1 46636 13247 30981 30% /boot
none 120016 0 120016 0% /dev/shm
/dev/cdrom 655808 655808 0 100% /mnt/cdrom
This example uses the disk filesystem or the df command to show free hard drive space and currently mounted devices and partitions. As you can see, the contents of the first Fedora Core CD-ROM is found under the /mnt/cdrom directory. If the CD-ROM is not mounted, use the mount command to manually mount the CD-ROM. You will need to be the superuser or Linux root operator to do this (see Chapter 5, "First Steps with Fedora," for details about how to become root):
Kode
# mount -t iso9660 /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom
You can then use the convert and copy (dd) command like so:
Kode
# dd if=/mnt/cdrom/images/nameofimage.img of=/dev/fd0
This will take the contents of the specified image file (from Table 3.1) and create a diskette in the DOS drive A (represented by /dev/fd0). Use /dev/fd1 if you want to use an installed secondary floppy drive.
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PC notebook users installing via a network or external CD-ROM drive using a PCMCIA adapter should also create the pcmciadd.img diskette.
