This procedure has been supplanted by a procedure which requires only one floppy disk. Please go here

. You need two different floppy disks for this procedure.
  1. Log into your GL account under Linux in one of the machines in ITE 240 (may work elsewhere, but not sure).
  2. Open up a shell, and type the following: wget http://www.cs.umbc.edu/courses/undergraduate/421/Fall04/initrd-disk.img.bz2 wget http://www.cs.umbc.edu/courses/undergraduate/421/Fall04/grub-disk.img.bz2
  3. Insert your first floppy disk into the floppy drive and type: bzcat grub-disk.img.bz2 > /dev/fd0
  4. Insert your second floppy disk into the floppy drive and type: bzcat initrd-disk.img.bz2 > /dev/fd0 You now have in hand the two disks that you need to boot off of the USB drive.
  5. Insert the grub boot disk into the floppy drive, and reboot. Make sure to boot from that floppy disk.
  6. Presently, a grub command line will appear. At the command line, type the following: root (hd1,0) kernel /vmlinuz-2.4.21-20.EL ro root=LABEL=/1 hdc=ide-scsi If there are no error messages, remove the grub boot disk from the floppy drive, and insert the initrd disk into the floppy drive. Then type: initrd (fd0)/initrd.img If there are no error messages, then type boot Hopefully, you will then be able to boot into the Linux installation on your USB drive. After you boot up for the first time, the system will reboot automatically. Do no be concerned by this. Just follow the instructions again, and you will be able to continue booting.
  7. So now that you have been able to boot into the Linux installation on your USB drive, you must now repair the installation on that drive so that you can boot directly off of the drive in the future. To do that, mount the initrd disk which is still in the floppy drive: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy Then copy the good ram disk image onto your hard drive: cp /mnt/floppy/initrd.img /boot/initrd.img The final task is to notify grub that you want to it to use the good image instead of the bad one from now on. Edit the file /boot/grub/menu.lst . Put a '#' symbol in front of all of the lines that have the word 'initrd' in them to comment them out and add references to the good initrd image instead. Should look something like this: #initrd /initrd-2.4.21-20.EL.img initrd /initrd.img
Now with any luck, you should be able to boot into your Linux installation without trouble. Just use F12 during startup and select the USB Flash device. There will be two choices for kernals, you can use the one that says "... WS-UP(2.4.21-20.EL)".