[Sussex] Getting brave ?, perhaps not.

[John D.]

Hi list,

With my attempts :( at installing gentoo, I have managed to get all the way 
though (or so I thought!).

I have managed (twice) to get the stage 3 tarball unpacked, I have managed to 
get the portage snapshot unpacked (once). 

I've then followed the procedure through, until I get to bootloaders. Now I 
want to be able to boot from floppy until I'm happy with what's going on with 
my system, then I'll modify my lilo.conf (the version used by my mandrake 
install) to be able to boot from hard disc.

On both occasions, I have made a boot disc using - dd 
if=/boot/kernel-2.4.20-gentoo-r6 of=/dev/fd0 - (this is again taken from the 
install guide, except I have put the correct kernel version for genkernel - 
as far as I can tell).

When I try and boot from the floppy, it starts to load, then stops telling me 
"invalid compressed format (ERR1) -- System Halted", so how do i blank/format 
a floppy under linux and how would I check that the floppy has been written 
correctly from the command line ???

regards

John