My friend Chris Bell wrote:

"First thing you need to do is make sure you have a completely uncorrupted floopy disk. Put it in the drive and run this command:

# fdformat /dev/fd0H1440

If it reports errors, trash the floppy and try again. If it doesn't report any errors, then run this command:

# mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 `uname -r`

That will make a boot disk for the running kernel. You can replace the `uname -r` with the kernel version you want a disk for, look in /lib/modules for valid values for that command argument."

Then, one user asked: "Was it incorrect for me to use

dd if=/boot/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0 bs=8192

to create my boot floppy for my RedHat system? The floppy seems to boot nicely.

And to that Chris said: "No, it wasn't incorrect, however, the boot floppy created is limited in that it uses no boot loader so you are unable to pass any command line arguments to the kernel at boot time (such as boot to single user mode or run level 3 for text only and so on). It will boot the system, sure, but not be useful for system recovery where you require single user mode or that X not start automatically."

-- PaulJohnson - 07 Feb 2003