Question:
I boot my DEbian 2.2R4 using floppy,but the process is very
slow..at least much slower than other linux distr...how can i improve
the speed based on boot by floopy...(there is no hardware problem)
i have a 2.2r4 boot floppy,,can i boot 2.2r5?
Answer:
As was mentioned in the earlier response, how slow the floppy boot is
has much more to do with what type of boot floppy it is, rather than
what distro it was made from or what version of potato you're running.
Most likely it is loading the kernel image from the floppy disk, which
takes a while.
You can configure Lilo (or Grub) to boot from floppy disk so that only
the first sector is read from the floppy disk, and then everything else
is loaded from the hard drive. That will be much faster. To do that,
you'll have to configure Lilo to install it's boot sector on a floppy
(boot=/dev/fd0). The man pages for lilo and lilo.conf, as well as the
Lilo manual in /usr/share/doc/lilo/Manual.txt.gz, have the information
you need.
I got the same latency w/ the floppy boot disk created from initial
install. i'm using a w2k <--work laptop & woody dual boot and 'load
linux' takes about 2mins (forever) on a p3700. I'll probably go back to
lilo though the lilo mbr I had from potato got 'upgraded' and 'hosed' my
mbr-- lots of l01's across the screen. I grabbed a 98 boot disk and
fdisk /mbr so I could get back to work; then; later tried to run lilo
config again and again following the lilo walkthrough without success.
I don't however know what kind of boot disk it is; probably the kernel
image.
