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Sindi Keesan wrote:
>
> The zimage file that is copied to them by make_fd.bat 
> is always bad.  

It is strange that I have never run into this problem myself
(although I only test these things on two computers).  I
have never had the slightest problem with that routine.

> We have destroyed at least five floppy disks already.

I doubt that they are destroyed.  They probably just need
a proper formatting.

> Jim thinks you should not be trying to copy a disk image 
> that is smaller than the disk.

Interesting point.  The image file is only only 105kb so it 
will occupy only the beginning of the floppy.  The formatting 
on the remainder of the floppy comes from whatever system was 
used to format the disk in the first place.  The worst case 
scenario is an unformatted floppy:  anything copied to that
floppy beyond the 105kb will not take.

I'm not seeing a problem here because my two systems have
similar alignments on their floppy drives.  However, if your
drives are out of alignment from mine, there will be a jarring
inconsistency at 105kb.  Since your problems appear to be with
zimage, I'm guessing that the inconsistency hits somewhere in
the middle of that. 

> Jim is making his own setup in which the user first has to 
> make a boot disk, and his steup it will simply copy files to 
> it and run the batch files to split and combine and things.  
> No need to copy a disk image.  

That's the method I used to use.  It should work fine.

> I said not to make a large disk image since it would take a 
> while to download 

I should probably replace bl2-fd.img with a 1.44mb version.
If I zero out all the bytes beyond 105kb, it shouldn't be much 
bigger when compressed.  That will eliminate the inconsistency 
at 105kb, but out-of-alignment floppies could still have a 
problem reading/writing the floppy.  Although it appears that 
the single inconsistency at  105kb is a bigger fishhook than 
overall misalignment.

> Any DOS ought to work for making a boot disk.  

That's what I thought too (when BL1 used that method).  I was
wrong.  I used to have endless problems when make_fd.bat relied 
upon people formatting their own floppies.

> The ramdisk will probably be Z.  It might be 8M instead of 4M 

What's the point of 8mb?  Other than making it impossible to
run on systems with 8mb RAM.

> to make it 4M or 64M 

And the purpose of 64mb is?

> Steven may have used DOS 3.3 so that the Ramdisk would always 
> be C> since  3.3. won't recognize most hard drives 

I used it because it was the smallest DOS I had that would do
the job.

> Does 3.3 recognize CD-ROM drives?  

Does it matter for a transitory DOS used only to boot a floppy-
version of Linux?

Cheers,
Steven