Make a Floppy Boot Disk for Ubuntu from Linux
I was trying to install Ubuntu on a machine the other day and having a few issues. One thing going wrong was that the CD wouldn't boot. With a bit of searching, I found that there is a boot manager, Smart Boot Manager, included with Ubuntu that you can install on a floppy disk. This, believe it or not, allows you to boot Ubuntu from a floppy disk. Unfortunately, the instructions on the Ubuntu wiki for creating a floppy boot disk for Ubuntu do not work on other Linux machines. They are Windows based. I was eventually able to get one made from another Ubuntu machine. These instructions should work on any Linux machine, though they may have a slight bias towards *Ubuntu.
1. Find the file entitled sbm.bin, or if you have Breezy or earlier, sbootmgr.dsk under the install directory of the Ubuntu installation CD. If you do not have one on hand, you can download the boot manager from its official site
2. Insert a blank floppy disk formatted for Windows into the floppy drive. If you have a USB floppy drive, then you will need to find the device name first and use it in place of /dev/fd0 throughout the rest of this tutorial. On KDE, you can find this by hovering over the mounted floppy drive on the desktop. The field marked Device Node is what you need.
3. Go to a terminal and cd into the directory where you have the smart boot manager.
4. Insert the command below. If you did not get the boot manager from a current Ubuntu CD, replace sbm.bin with the correct name. Also make sure that /dev/fd0 is the correct device name. It should be on most internal floppy drives.
dd if=sbm.bin of=/dev/fd0
Now you can insert both the floppy disk and the CD into the computer and reboot. Make sure your computer is set to boot from the floppy drive though. You should then get a menu where you can select to boot the CD… and you're then done! Let me know if you have any issues.
Nice tip dude, and very useful
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@CristanPC: I'm glad you liked the article. Thanks for the translation, though I'd appreciate it if you'd let me know in the future first, even if it isn't exact.
Any chance of getting ^that^ in noobese/English?
To give you an idea of the noobeseness involved: What's "cd" mean? And how is it done?
I have a friend's O*L*D machine that's running W95 on a 100MHz CPU, with a 1G HD and 24M (upgraded from the original 8Mb) of memory.
I want to install DSL (DamnSmallLinux) on it, but the machine doesn't recognize the CD - which works fine in my Feisty-equipped machine.
Trudging through 'stuff', it appears I need a boot floppy in order to get that older machine to "see" the DSL CD.
I don't know how to make a floppy using Feisty, and I've gotten nowhere in learning how (in beginner's terms I can comprehend).
On my Feisty-equipped machine, which previously ran W2Kpro, if I insert a floppy nothing happens. Zilch.
Help?
@Jimmj43: I'll start off by saying that I am not the best person to ask about hardware problems. You may want to ask in #ubuntu on IRC or the Ubuntu Forums about getting your floppy working. I do recommend that at least you try out this command:
mount /dev/fd0
If that doesn't work, I'm not really sure. Mine worked out of the box.
Now the instructions should be fairly clear cut. The boot disk should work for DSL too, but I will not that SBM (the boot manager used in this tutorial) does not work with all types of hardware. If you have any specific questions, let me know. You can also email me (jatecblog jake@howtogeek.com) if you'd rather. I will note that I have a machine with similar specs that previously ran Windows 3.1 working with a version of Slackware, though I haven't tried with DSL.
Good luck! If anyone else here has any suggestions, feel free to add them.