Talk:TIP Bootable Floppy with GRUB

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

Overall an excellent page. I did just add an optional step that some folks might find useful. If you will always be using the floppy on the same system, without alot of configuration changes, it can be nice to copy menu.lst (aka grub.conf) onto the floppy so that you get a menu to boot off of instead of having to manually enter all the boot commands.

I found this out the hard way, as my system has some kind of wierd hardware bug where it won't load GRUB off the hard drive, (I get an error message "GRUB Hard Disk Error" which per the GRUB manual means "The stage2 or stage1.5 is being read from a hard disk, and the attempt to determine the size and geometry of the hard disk failed."

I found however that the system will boot fine if I have GRUB on a floppy. Adding the menu makes it almost as nice as booting off the hard drive.

Gooserider

[edit] Booting a root partition from a "LiveUSB"

I was wondering if you could use this approach to creating a boot floppy that would point to a root partition on a USB flash drive that contains the contents of a GNU/Linux LiveCD? It seems like there may be driver issues, but any suggestions are welcome! Thanks!

Josh