Hadn't thought of that because dos rawrite usually would complain about that but dd doesn't. Remember, though, that my problem is occurring on the myboot.img floppy, not the ramdisk. Of course, part of this could be due to the need for dd as part of the command line at boot, if indeed this is needed for the ramdisk, but it would have to be the .img file that is too big, which I imagine would explain the kernel image not being found. Here are the sizes of the redhat 7.2 and 7.3 boot.img, myboot.img and initrd.gz files. Cheryl all of the boot.img and myboot.img files purport to be 1474560 bytes. The initrd.gz for 7.2 is 996136 bytes. the initrd.gz for 7.3 is 780745 bytes. So the initrd.gz is actually smaller for 7.3. the initrd for 7.3 is 780745 bytes.