*BSD News Article 12032


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From: cg18fbi@icogsci2.ucsd.edu (Richard Dante)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: Emergency Boot Disk
Message-ID: <45816@sdcc12.ucsd.edu>
Date: 1 Mar 93 06:17:29 GMT
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In article <4847@iris.mincom.oz.au> paulc@iris.mincom.oz.au (Paul Cameron) writes:
>I'm trying to create an Emergency Boot disk on a 3.5" floppy disk.
>There's no Format command, so I can't format the disk. Disklabel
>won't work on DOS formatted disks. NEWFS won't work because Disklabel
>won't work, and MOUNT certainly won't work.
>
>Can anyone help me out here ?

Although I once thought I created a bootable floppy using NEWFS on a DOS
formated disk, I know right off the top of my head that you can always dd a
boot image (either tiny or fixit) to a disk, mount it and then erase all the
contents with rm -rf. Then you will have an empty boot disk.

dd if=disk.fs of=/dev/fd0a bs=16k
mount /dev/fd0a /mnt
cd /mnt
rm -rf *


Rick Dante