making floppy systems

[Adi Linden]

Hi,

Building a compressed ramdisk to fit on a floppy is no problem especially
if you use the tinylogin/busybox combination.

So far I've been doing the task of building the ramdisk and loading the
kernel and ramdisk onto the floppy by hand.

I am working on a bunch of scripts that will build systems on a attached
harddrive (primarly meant for CompactFlash or DOC accessed like an IDE
drive). Since the HD loading involves partitioning the target device this
isn't really feasable for a floppy disk.

Reading this note I will add floppy to another type of target to build
using those script which will eventually driven by pwlconfig as a user
interface.

I have some scanned pages of my notebook (pen and pencil notebook) from
the early beginnings of my embedded systems building experience. Have a
look at it and see if it makes sense.
 
http://adis.on.ca/BlackBook/bootdisk1.jpeg
http://adis.on.ca/BlackBook/bootdisk2.jpeg
http://adis.on.ca/BlackBook/bootdisk3.jpeg

I can take the relevant portions out of it and write some quick
instructions of how to load a filesystem build using pwlconfig and located
in Embedded_Build/projects/<your project name>/mnt onto a floppy disk.

Hope this helps!

TTYL,
Adi

> --- fred anger <anger@rightarm.org> wrote:
> > Hello all.  I'm new to PWL, and haven't seen any specific docs on creating
> > bootable floppy systems.  Please point me to docs if there are any.  
> > pwlconfig seems to want to flash to /dev/hda1, and unlike some docs I've
> > read, I'm not given the opportunity to specify that I want a floppy
> > system.  Perhaps it's buried in the menus?
> >  
> The floppy support is not provided as originally envisioned (and documented).

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