Gnu Parted

It's often necessary to boot from a different device (such as floppy) than the one you are operating on (most likely a hard disk). Although a bootable floppy image is provided by the package maintainers, it has minimal hardware support (say, oh... you wanted to boot from USB floppy). Since that is a raw boot disk (that is, no file system) it can't be used after booting from another disk. There are instructions in the Parted manual for copying the necessary files from the boot floppy to an ext2 floppy but the process is troublesome since you have to start with the boot disk and due to the dynamic libraries.

[Need to take a look at the parted-bf Debian package and see what that is about.]

As an alternative here are instructions for creating a statically linked parted executable (tested on Debian GNU/Linux):

First get the latest source package, unpack it, and cd to the top directory. From there:

$ ./configure --enable-all-static

$ apt-get install e2fslibs-dev uuid-dev
$ ./configure --enable-all-static

$ make

$ ldd parted
        not a dynamic executable

Now copy the executable file (./parted/parted) to a floppy disk to use during your installation.

This should fit on a floppy, but if not maybe you can save some space by stripping the executable:

$ ls -l parted
... 942131 Nov  2 12:11 parted
$ strip parted
$ ls -l parted
... 825456 Nov  2 12:48 parted