[syslinux] Creating a bootable FS thats larger than 2880?

Shaun Reitan mailinglists at unix-scripts.com
Fri Apr 29 15:28:20 PDT 2005


I've been attempting to create a bootable image thats double the size of the 2880 floppy disk.  I can do the following to create a image that will boot with memdisk but i cant seam to get it to work with a larger size.

What works...
       dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy288.img bs=1024 count=2880
       mkdosfs floppy288.img
       ms-sys -1 -f floppy288.img
       mount -o loop floppy288.img /mnt
       cp msdos.sys /mnt/
       cp io.sys /mnt/
       cp command.com /mnt/

I then boot that using PXE and it works fine.  The problem comes when i try to grow the image
    dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy288.img bs=1024 count=5760
    mkdosfs floppy288.img
    ms-sys -1 -f floppy288.img
    mount -o loop floppy288.img /mnt
    cp msdos.sys /mnt/
    cp io.sys /mnt/
    cp command.com /mnt/


I'm basically following the instructions/example from ms-sys above.

I'm sure i'm just doing somthing stupid, i know that memdisk assumes that images larger than 2880 are a harddisk and i even tryed passing the floppy param (whch it did say floppy and not harddisk) but i continue to get errors when trying to boot.

Basically what i'm trying to do is create a bootable msdos fs so i can load Symantic Ghost.  Ghost8 is now just a hair larger than 2880 and if i have to load any extra nic drivers it's even larger.

---
Shaun



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