How To Boot Floppy Image Using Grub Bootloader

You want to boot your computer from a floppy, but your computer doesnt have a floppy drive. You can boot your computer from a floppy disk image if you have the GRUB bootloader installed. Follow the simple steps below.

Install the syslinux package on your system. Instructions vary by distro. For a Debian/Ubuntu/MEPIS system, for instance, you would either choose it from Synaptic, or from the command line with “apt-get install syslinux”.

Copy the memdisk file from /usr/lib/syslinux to the /boot directory.

Copy the floppy disk image (ie. image.img) to the /boot directory.

Add an entry to /boot/grub/menu.lst that looks like:

• title My Floppy Disk
• root (hd0,0)
• kernel /boot/memdisk
• initrd /boot/image.img

Run update-grub

Reboot.

Note

• It is not really necessary to copy the floppy image and the memdisk kernel to the boot directory (but it makes things a lot easier to remember).
• The floppy image will be read-only; all changes will be lost when the computer is rebooted. It might be handy to create a small partition on your hard drive that the operating system can write to.
• Make sure you make a backup of your current GRUB menu.