[OpenIndiana-discuss] 2.88Mb floppy image file.

[Albert Lee]

On Wed, May 1, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Albert Lee <trisk at nexenta.com> wrote:

> 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
>> ...
>>
>

BTW, don't use CD or other physical media. If you have a working GRUB or
other bootloader, use memdisk to boot the the images directly:
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK#GRUB_and_GRUB4DOS

-Albert


>
>> 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).
>> _______________________________________________
>> OpenIndiana-discuss mailing list
>> OpenIndiana-discuss at openindiana.org
>> http://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Albert Lee <trisk at nexenta.com>
> Nexenta Systems, Inc. | www.nexenta.com




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