Red Hat Knowledgebase

Two different methods for producing an installation boot disk exist, depending upon the operating system i.e. either UNIX/Linux or DOS/Windows.

Using UNIX/Linux, mount the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation CD-ROM, enter the /images directory, insert a floppy in your drive, and use the dd command to copy the image to the floppy:

dd if=diskboot.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=1440k

Using DOS/Windows, use the rawrite command in the /dosutils directory on the CD-ROM. Documentation on using rawrite in this way is available in /dosutils/rawrite3.doc.

To make floppies under DOS, Win95, or NT, first boot into DOS and change to the CD-ROM directory, for example, D:.

Enter the dosutils directory and run rawrite.

cd \dosutils
rawrite.exe

When prompted for a disk for the boot image, enter \path\to\bootdisk.img.

The .img files are boot images and can be found in the images directory on the first Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation CD-ROM

Note: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 ships with a 2.6 series based kernel which is too large to fit onto a floppy disk as an image. Use the Bootable CD or a USB Pen drive to start the installation process in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and above.