mkbootdisk - floppy out of space 1

[tarx]

Preparing for a kernel upgrade I am trying to create a boot disk using mkbootdisk, unfortunately during the process I am advised that there is no space left on the diskette.

Is there a way to make mkbootdisk span diskettes? presumably it defaults to copying the minimum files.

TIA

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

That shouldn't happen - are you using a disk with stuff on it already ? I'm not sure whether mkbootdisk effectively formats and copies at the same time (its not clear from the man page) - if not, it may fallover if you have existing files on the diskette.

The other possibiities could be that you are not using a HD diskette or have a lot of scsi type drivers that make the initrd too big to fit on a 1.44mb floppy. Have you tried running it with the 'verbose' option. For example :

mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0 --verbose 2.4.17

(where 2.4.17 is the kernel version)

Hope this helps

 

[Tarquin]

Thanks for your response.

The current kernel is 2.4.9-12smp as supplied by RedHat.

When running mkbootdisk verbosely the following is seen:

>formatting /dev/fd0... done.
>Copying /boot/vmlinuz-2.4.9-12smp... done.
>Creating initrd image...
>gzip: stout: No space left on device
>done.
>Setting up syslinux... cat: write error No space left on device
>done.

The mkbootdisk script contains the following lines:

>[ -n "$verbose" ] && echo -n "Formatting $device... "
>mkdosfs -I $device > /dev/null || {
> echo "Failed to format $device" >&2
> exit 1

vmlinuz-2.4.9-12smp is 1048875 bytes
initrd-2.4.9-12smp.img is 394600 bytes
= 1443475 bytes

 

[chiph]

Tarquin -

Possibly stupid question -
Is is a 1.44mb diskette and not a 720k?

I ran across one in my "to be reformatted" stack a while back that I must have picked up from somewhere...

Chip H.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,



Hmmmm. Thats quite a large kernel there. You could try making a non-SMP bootdisk instead - that should work because its that bit smaller. Alternatively, you could try passing a higher capacity floppy device to mkbootdisk to see if it will format it as 1.722 :



mkbootdisk --device /dev/fd0u1722 --verbose 2.4.9-12



Regards