Bootable floppy disks are commonly used to boot the installer system for machines with a floppy drive. Floppies can also be used for installation of the kernel and modules on most systems.
Disk images are files containing the complete contents of a floppy disk in raw form. Disk images, such as boot.img, cannot simply be copied to floppy drives. A special program is used to write the image files to floppy disk in raw mode. This is required because these images are raw representations of the disk; it is required to do a sector copy of the data from the file onto the floppy.
There are different techniques for creating floppies from disk images, which depend on your platform. This section describes how to create floppies from disk images on different platforms.
No matter which method you use to create your floppies, you should remember to flip the tab on the floppies once you have written them, to ensure they are not damaged unintentionally.
To write the floppy disk image files to the floppy disks, you will probably need root access to the system. Place a good, blank floppy in the floppy drive. Next, use the command
dd if=file of=/dev/fd0 bs=1024 conv=sync ; sync |
where file is one of the floppy disk image files (see Abschnitt 4.2, „Downloading Files from Debian Mirrors“ for what file should be). /dev/fd0 is a commonly used name of the floppy disk device, it may be different on your workstation (on Solaris, it is /dev/fd/0). The command may return to the prompt before Unix has finished writing the floppy disk, so look for the disk-in-use light on the floppy drive and be sure that the light is out and the disk has stopped revolving before you remove it from the drive. On some systems, you'll have to run a command to eject the floppy from the drive (on Solaris, use eject, see the manual page).
Some systems attempt to automatically mount a floppy disk when you place it in the drive. You might have to disable this feature before the workstation will allow you to write a floppy in raw mode. Unfortunately, how to accomplish this will vary based on your operating system. On Solaris, you can work around volume management to get raw access to the floppy. First, make sure that the floppy is auto-mounted (using volcheck or the equivalent command in the file manager). Then use a dd command of the form given above, just replace /dev/fd0 with /vol/rdsk/floppy_name, where floppy_name is the name the floppy disk was given when it was formatted (unnamed floppies default to the name unnamed_floppy). On other systems, ask your system administrator.
If you have access to an i386 machine, you can use one of the following programs to copy images to floppies.
The FDVOL, WrtDsk or RaWrite3 programs can be used under MS-DOS.
To use these programs, first make sure that you are booted into DOS. Trying to use these programs from within a DOS box in Windows, or double-clicking on these programs from the Windows Explorer is not expected to work. If you don't know how to boot into DOS, just hit F8 while booting.
NTRawrite is a freeware contemporary version of Rawrite/Rawrite3 that is compatible with WinNT and Win2K. It is a self-explanatory GUI application; you select the disk drive to write to, browse to the disk image you want to place there and hit the Write button.
The messages shown by the rescue floppy (before loading the Linux kernel) can be shown in your mother tongue. To achieve this if you are not an English speaker, after writing the image file, you must copy the provided message files and a font to the floppy. For MS-DOS and Windows users there is a batch file setlang.bat in the dosutils directory, which copies the correct files. Simply enter this directory (e.g. cd c:\debian\dosutils) within a command prompt window, and run setlang lang, where lang is a two-letter code of your language in lower case, for example setlang pl to set the language to Polish. Currently these language codes are available:
ca cs da de eo es fi fr gl hr hu it ko ja pl pt ru sk sv tr zh_CN |
Note that the descriptions in this manual assume that you use non localized (English) installation; otherwise the names of menus and buttons will differ from what you will see on your screen.