Comments on: Need to squeeze a little more on that floppy? https://dfarq.homeip.net/need-to-squeeze-a-little-more-on-that-floppy/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=need-to-squeeze-a-little-more-on-that-floppy David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more Wed, 19 Apr 2023 13:20:44 +0000 hourly 1 By: Anonymous https://dfarq.homeip.net/need-to-squeeze-a-little-more-on-that-floppy/#comment-3193 Wed, 18 Aug 2004 18:08:46 +0000 https://dfarq.homeip.net/?p=1281#comment-3193 In reply to Anonymous.

Steve, I don’t know where I got the idea that 1.72 meg disks aren’t bootable because I just formatted one with FreeDOS and it boots just fine. Maybe other versions of DOS don’t like them. Or maybe I had a bad disk the last time I tried it. Anyway, it worked for me, so I’m going to change this entry to reflect that.

Thanks!

]]> By: Anonymous https://dfarq.homeip.net/need-to-squeeze-a-little-more-on-that-floppy/#comment-1108 Wed, 18 Aug 2004 03:52:14 +0000 https://dfarq.homeip.net/?p=1281#comment-1108 I’ve used tomsrtbt, “The most GNU/Linux on one floppy disk”, and noticed that it formats a 1.44 diskette to 1.722. Quite handy for a minimal bootable Linux.

I haven’t booted to a non-Linux boot disk very often since I last used Ghost. Mostly I boot to a Knoppix CD (a version of Debian Linux) when I want to boot to a non-installed o/s. It can read ntfs, though I’m not sure about write support.

I did find FreeDOS on a bootable CD to be very handy once. I had tried experimenting with dual booting my laptop from work to several Linuxes and one managed to hose the mbr, rendering the Windows install unbootable. No floppy, only a bootable CD. Booted to FreeDOS, did “fdisk /mbr”, problem fixed.

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-Steve

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