[OpenIndiana-discuss] 2.88Mb floppy image file.

[Jonathan Adams]

Hi ... I was recently trying to create a 2.88Mb floppy file to try and BIOS
upgrade a Dell computer that wouldn't boot anything graphical.

I know I'm probably going about this wrong, but I cannot seem to use
fdformat, or mkfs -F pcfs on a file, in order to burn the file to a cdrom
...

jadams at jadlaptop:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test.ima bs=1024 count=2880
2880+0 records in
2880+0 records out
jadams at jadlaptop:~$ pfexec lofiadm -a /tmp/test.ima
/dev/lofi/1
jadams at jadlaptop:~$ pfexec mkfs -F pcfs -o
fat=12,nofdisk,ntrack=160,nsect=36,fat=12,b="test-disk",size=2880k,v -o
fat=12 /dev/rlofi/1
Opening destination device/file.
Requested offset: Sector 0.
Requested size is too small for FAT16.

(strange since I'm sure I told it do do fat12 ...)

jadams at jadlaptop:~$ pfexec fdformat -E -t dos -b "test-disk" -f /dev/rlofi/1
fdformat: DKIOCGAPART failed, Inappropriate ioctl for device

I'm aware that what I'm doing seems foolish, I just wanted a big enough
space to copy the dell BIOS and some RAMDISK drivers+config.sys to it.

I'm just baffled by how I would even do this on Solaris, or Illumos to a
file.

I managed to get it to work on a 1.44Mb floppy from someone else's site
because they had smaller drivers for RAMDISK operation and I didn't care
what the screen or keyboard worked like ... but I only had a couple of K to
spare.

It didn't fix the issue, turns out someone had just been into the BIOS and
changed the hard-drive settings to AHCI (which XP SP2 wouldn't see).