[syslinux] booting from floppy

[H. Peter Anvin]

Roberto De Leo wrote:
>>
>>
>>> how to tell syslinux to boot from a floppy but to look for the initrd.gz
>>> file in a second floppy?
>>>
>> It's not supported at this time.  I have considered adding support for
>> it, but it's a pretty big change.
>>
> This is kind of sad. My problem is that there are some BIOS on which CDs
> made
> with isolinux do not boot, so I thought I could solve the problem using
> floppies.
> But to produce a single floppy containing both initrd.gz and vmlinuz
> takes a lot
> of time to produce because you have to make both very small and it is not
> easy. Maybe I can manage to do it but I'd prefere finding some better
> solution.
> 
> Is there anything I can do for PCs where the isolinux CDs do not boot?
>

There is a way to get the kernel itself (as opposed to syslinux) to load
a ramdisk from a second floppy, though.  It's an important distinction,
because for one thing the kernel will not work from anything but a real
legacy floppy -- no USB, IDE, or any kind of emulated device.

	-hpa