inserting the floppy, it boots Linux. Unfortunately, the floppy just stopped working (I get the Linux prompt, but then booting reports disk failure) for some reason. I need to retrieve several files on the Linux hard drive. I have RedHat 7.1 on cd. Can a new boot floppy be made while preserving the existing Linux installation?
Norm, This is no big deal if you know what hardware you have. You will need a second linux machine to solve this so perhaps someone will agree to drop by the next meeting with a laptop. 1. Get a machine with mtools, superformat and syslinux installed and a kernel source tree. 2. Recompile a non-modular kernel with support for your hardware and filesystems and nothing else. 3. Insert a floppy and then run: superformat /dev/hd0 4. When that's done run: syslinux /dev/fd0 5. Mcopy the new kernel from /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot to the floppy: mcopy /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage a:\kernel.img 6. Open a text file called syslinux.cfg in your favorite editor. 7. Put the following in syslinux.cfg (with the appropriate value for your root parition filled in): DEFAULT LINUX LABEL LINUX KERNEL kernel.img APPEND root=/dev/{your root partition device here} 8. Save that file then mcopy it to the floppy: mcopy syslinux.cfg a: 9. Reboot your machine from the floppy. There are other ways to do this that may be more elegant. For example you may be able to so this on your machine by booting the rescue kernel with the first RedHat CD and then chrooting to your environment. This how I do it, though ;-). -Adam