Wanted: Tiny boot loader for dual floppy boot.

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goingnuts
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Joined: Sun 07 Dec 2008, 13:33
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Wanted: Tiny boot loader for dual floppy boot.

#1 Post by goingnuts »

I am looking for a tiny boot loader which can handle a dual floppy boot - that means initrd and main sfs on one floppy and a large kernel on the other floppy. Below my findings and notes until now:

For a single floppy boot syslinux is small (15K on disk) and effective:

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syslinux -s /dev/fd0 	#for real floppy
syslinux -s image.file	#for floppy image
But I cant find any hints about dual floppy boot syntax.

loadlin.exe works for single floppy too - but even though loadlin.exe is small (11K on disk) is needs the minimal dos programs (command.com, io.sys and msdos.sys) which adds 131K to the system. I don't know if it has syntax for dual floppy boot - but size alone leaves loadlin.exe out. Syntax to start linux via loadlin.exe after boot:

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a:\loadlin a:\bzImage initrd=a:\Image.gz root=/dev/ram0
For dual floppy boot grub legacy works but is (too) large (100K on disk):
Floppy 1 contains initrd, main.sfs and the grub files (stage0 & stage2)
Floppy 2 contains kernel
Example menu.lst:

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title Floppy Puppy
root (fd0)
pause Insert floppy number 2 (kernel) then press enter
kernel /bzImage root=/dev/fd0
pause Insert floppy number 1 again (initrd and main.sfs) then press enter
initrd /initrd.gz
Question: Any suggestions for a tiny boot-loader (20-30K) which is able to boot large kernel via dual floppy setup?

Les Kerf
Posts: 317
Joined: Sun 24 Jun 2012, 13:30

#2 Post by Les Kerf »

I don't know if the PloP boot loader will do what you want, but it may be worth a look.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html


amigo
Posts: 2629
Joined: Mon 02 Apr 2007, 06:52

#4 Post by amigo »

lilo?

goingnuts
Posts: 932
Joined: Sun 07 Dec 2008, 13:33
Contact:

#5 Post by goingnuts »

Thank you for very interesting input! Lots of fun ahead :D

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