Peanut Linux RAWRITE 1.72MB Error

[rms]

Hi Everybody ,

I have an old PC that does not support booting from the CD drive so I am trying to create the boot floppies for Peanut Linux. It requires two floppies on the normal 1.44MB but the first for Boot.img at 1.72MB. I had no problem creating the floppy from the root.img but keep getting Write Errors from Rawrite when trying to create the floppy image from boot.img. FMT seems to format the floppy at 1.72MB without problems but RAWRITE will not copy the image over. I have tried this on two different PCs and with different floppies and the same error occurs.

Any ideas anybody? I'm about to give up on Peanut Linux and find another distro that works on older hardware (Pentium 90) and that doesn't need a 1.72MB bootable floppy.

Thanks In Advance,
Bob Siegel

[mdwatts]

I find it kinda odd that Peanut Linux only includes 1.72mb bootdisk images.

Are you quite sure they don't have the standard 1.44mb boot images somewhere on the installation cd?

Also have a read of the rawrite docs on the cd to see if there is a possible switch you can supply to allow writing to a 1.72mb formatted diskette.

[rms]

Peanut Linux images are 1.72MB for boot.img and 1.44MB for root.img. There are no other options that I could find. One of this distros selling points is its small size, the CD image is only 210 MB.

I did finally get it working. I was trying to create the images on a Windows NT 4 SP6a machine. It still failed when I booted with a DOS 6.22 diskette and used the RAWRITE executable on the Peanut CD image.

However, I downloaded and installed a trial version of WinImage from www.winimage.com/winimage.htm. I then rebooted the PC so no other programs were running to minimize conflicts. Using WinImage I formatted the diskette at 1.44MB to see if there were any bad sectors at the normal density. There were none so I reformatted it with WinImage at 1.72. I did get errors formatting tracks 80 and 81. WinImage couldn't continue so I told it to abort the format. I then looked at the diskette with Windows Explorer and it didn't give me any errors. So I continued with WinImage to copy the boot.img from the CD to the diskette. Again I got errors when it was copying to tracks 80 and 81. I aborted the image creation when it could not continue. I did note that the total size of the files in the boot.img is only 1.60MB so I thought maybe the files got copied before it got to tracks 80 and 81. I rebooted the PC with the boot image diskette and lo and behold the Peanut Linux install started. So I learned a lesson - don't always trust error messages!

Bob

[Sepero]

RMS, short for Richard M Stallman?

Coincidence, I think not!!! :p