Use a Floppy to Boot USB Pendrive Linux | USB Pen Drive Linux

Use a Floppy to Boot USB Pendrive Linux

If you have a system that does not support booting from a USB device, but do have a floppy drive, you can try to boot Pendrive Linux from a USB flash drive using a Grub Boot floppy disk. When using a Boot floppy with a Grub boot loader, Grub locates the USB partition and then attempts to boot loading vmlinuz and initrd.gz from the USB device.

This tutorial assumes your using the Pendrive Linux version located HERE and your USB flash drive contains a Volume label of PDL. See screenshot:

Volume Label

Pendrive Linux USB Boot Floppy Requirements:

* Linux CD/USB or installed OS
* Floppy drive/Floppy disk
* Your Pendrive Linux USB flash drive

Creating a Boot Floppy to Boot Pendrive Linux from a USB device:

1. Insert a blank floppy disk
2. Open a terminal and type sudo su
3. Type wget http://pendrivelinux.com/downloads/pdlfloppy.img.gz
4. Type gzip -dc pdlfloppy.img.gz | dd of=/dev/fd0
5. Reboot your PC and set your system BIOS or Boot Menu to boot from floppy
6. From the floppy booted Grub Menu select a boot option:

Pendrivelinux (hd0,0) if the PC has no other ATA/USB/SCSI drives

Pendrivelinux (hd1,0) if the PC has other ATA/USB/SCSI drives

Troubleshooting Notes: If you still can\'t boot, try the following:

1. press C at the Grub Menu
2. Type find /casper/vmlinuz and make a note of which drive is displayed
3. Press Esc and then Press e
4. Press e again to edit the root (hd0,0) line
5. Change the line to reflect the drive displayed in step 2
6. Press Enter, then Enter again to boot

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