[OpenIndiana-discuss] 2.88Mb floppy image file.

[Albert Lee]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 12:17 PM, Jonathan Adams <t12nslookup at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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 ...)
>
>

size=2880k is 2880k 512-byte sectors or 1.5G, far too large for FAT12. You
meant size=5760. "2.88 MB" floppies still only have 80 tracks per side,
just twice as many sectors per track.
[trisk at monolith]% mkfile 2880k test.img && pfexec lofiadm -a test.img
/dev/lofi/1
[trisk at monolith]% pfexec mkfs -F pcfs -o
fat=12,ntrack=80,size=5760,spc=2,nofdisk /dev/rlofi/1
Construct a new FAT file system on /dev/rlofi/1: (y/n)? y


> 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).
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>



-- 
Albert Lee <trisk at nexenta.com>
Nexenta Systems, Inc. | www.nexenta.com