Grub on floppy

[Tony Nelson]

(I'm new to this list, so this isn't a properly threaded reply.  Bill did
finish on Tuesday saying that he would "retry over the next couple of
days", so I'm chiming in.)

If I read the problem right, the idea is to have the machine boot into
MSWindows when started normally, but into Linux via GRUB when a floppy is
used (as a key).  Having just installed FC3 and set it up to dual boot
using the MS bootloader, all I had to do was ask that the bootsector be
placed on /boot, reboot with the Rescue CD, fumble my way through copying
the bootsector onto a file on a floppy, and add a line to my boot.ini file
to use that floppy (and make other changes to my boot.ini file).

I think your case is simpler, and that all you need to do is to copy the
/boot bootsector onto the bootsector of a floppy using dd.  Booting the
machine from the floppy will boot directly into GRUB, as with my setup.

Someone with more experience should help with the actual commands to set up
the floppy.  Note that you don't want to mount the floppy and copy a file
to it; you want to copy the first 512 bytes of /boot onto the first 512
bytes of the floppy.  As a guess, something like:

    df    (to find what hda2 below should really be to refer to /boot)
    dd if=/dev/hda2 of=/dev/floppy bs=512 count=1

(Adapted from <http://www.geocities.com/epark/linux/grub-w2k-HOWTO.html> )

Luck!  From the sound of things you had a smoother install than I, and
didn't render your machine unbootable as I did (until I learned more about
ARC paths and Recovery Console and bootcfg).
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>