[OpenIndiana-discuss] 2.88Mb floppy image file.

[Jonathan Adams]

Ta for the mkfs, I knew I was missing something.

The PC was in an office that I didn't control, Ubuntu, and gparted iso's
booted happily, and the only good DOS boot isos that I could get my hands
on were all 1.44Mb ... fdos.org was supposed to have 2.88Mb floppies, but
the site is down, and freedos.org seemed to have "install" cd's not
"bootable" ones

Neither the CDrom, or the Hard-disk were available to be accessed from DOS,
so it was a boot and run within the .img file, I needed a ramdisk because
the Dell BIOS extracted a 2Mb "waste" file while it was running ... there
were several CD's that just went into the bin with a lot of trial and error.

I did in the end bring it back to our building, so I guess I could have
tried a net-boot ... or taken an image off one of my old "do everything"
disks that allowed ZIP drive access ... ahh well.

I hope to never have to go near that computer again, it's "working" now but
there are some other problems with it (specific home made PCI card no
longer works) :(

Thanks for clearing up the problem formatting the file :)

Jon


On 1 May 2013 19:59, Albert Lee <trisk at nexenta.com> wrote:

> 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
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