location on the disc. The system BIOS is able to read that section of the CD and load it into memory. If you burn the floppy image directly to a CD, it is no longer what I would call a `true' CD. It doesn't follow any of the standards at all and wouldn't be recognizeable as a CD by anything trying to read it. You wouldn't be able to put anything else on the CD (well, I suppose you could read it back with `dd', but that's a suboptimal option). Also, as it would (at most) only the boot block of the floppy image would be read, you wouldn't be able to boot off of it. Now, I should point out that mkisofs is only one of several different programs out there for making CDs. Unfortunately, I can't name any off the top of my head. (/me goes and throws Google at that problem..) There's a linux-kernel mailing list thread here: [http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9908.3/0765.html] Hmm.. I'm not finding much. There is a modified version of mkisofs called `mkhybrid', which is mostly for creating bootable CDs for the Macintosh. I am wondering what the `-G' generic bootable image option is, though. (for mkisofs and mkhybrid) There's a patch to mkisofs at http://www.colonel-panic.com/linux/ that was referenced in the above lkml thread, which might help for certain things, but I'm not sure. Again from the kernel thread, H. Peter Anvin is apparently working on a boot loader named `lbcon'. However, I'm not sure if it's any better or worse than the other boot loaders out there (GRUB is good, for instance), and he hasn't show any code that I'm aware of. Well, that's all getting a bit complicated. If you had a while to go write a new bootloader, this stuff might start getting really interesting, but that's probably only going to hurt things. Getting back to what John said about 1.7MB recovery floppies, I wonder if you could get one of those to work by just using dd to bring them up to 2.88MB. I don't really know much about filesystem layouts, so I don't know if that would be really bad or no problem at all. Also, with CDs, you don't need to have much on the initial floppy image anyway. I'd just have a kernel and an initial ramdisk with enough intelligence to search around for the CD and mount it as the root filesystem (which is essentially what the LinuxCare BBC does, though it mounts a compressed image of a filesystem that is on an iso9660 filesystem..) -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ In the carpool lane to / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ Nirvana. \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org