[olug] network installations

[Mark A. Martin]

Making a boot disk is easy and is done the same way for all
distributions.  It only takes one command per floppy.  The only
difference lies in which images you copy to floppies.  Read Red Hat's
description of how to do it at

http://www.redhat.com/support/manuals/RHL-7-Manual/install-guide/s1-steps-install-cdrom.html#S2-STEPS-MAKE-DISKS

and it should become clear.  (This is one of the URLs from my previous
message so there's probably no reason to bookmark it again.)

I recommend making the disks from linux using the dd command.  You can
even issue the command without the blocksize option (bs=1440k) that Red
Hat recommends.  As well as the above page at Red Hat, you can read the
man page for dd for more details.

One worthwhile precaution that Red Hat doesn't mention is that, if your
system is running the automount daemon so that floppies are
automatically mounted, you should unmount the floppy before performing
the raw copy, i.e. before dd'ing.

To check whether the floppy is mounted, type

mount

and look for an entry for /mnt/floppy or /dev/fdx, where x is a digit. 
If the floppy is mounted, unmount it using the command

umount /mnt/floppy

or

umount /dev/fdx,

where x is the appropriate number.  Once you've copied an image to a
floppy, you can mount the floppy and see what's there, if you want.  The
images are all ext2 filesystems.  Look at the man pages for mount and
umount for more information.

This isn't absolutely necessary but you might get confusing results if
the floppy is mounted during the copy.

Sometimes easy things can seem mysterious if you're expecting them to be
long, arcane, difficult processes.  This is one of those cases.  Don't
worry.  Be happy.

Mark
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Mark A. Martin					Dept of Applied Mathematics
http://www.amath.washington.edu/~mmartin	University of Washington
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