USB booting :: Booting with files NOT in root dir - HELP

Ok, so basically the linuxrc script, that runs after loading the ramdisk, tells where to find the knoppix directory and file. I just changed the variable for the directory and then it continued on after finding it.

So a quick step by step with the extreme details left out:
Copy the kernel (linux24) from one of the dsl packages to your directory on your media (cdrom, usb drive, etc)
Copy the /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX file to that same directory
copy over minirt24.gz to linux system
gzip -d minirt24.gz
mount -o loop minirt24 /mnt
cd /mnt
vi linuxrc
Change:
KNOPPIX_DIR="KNOPPIX"
KNOPPIX_NAME="KNOPPIX"
to:
KNOPPIX_DIR="<wherever>" #<wherever> is /boot/dsl for me (relative to media root)
KNOPPIX_NAME="KNOPPIX"
save, unmount, gzip -9, copy minirt24 back to media directory

###ADVANCED SECTION - ONLY NECESSARY IF YOU WANT EXTENSIONS####
There is a problem with the .dsl packages which requires modifying the dsl_config startup script in /etc/init.d (IIRC). You need to change it from /cdrom to /cdrom/<wherever> (in my case /cdrom/boot/dsl) and then those load properly.
This is a bit harder than it looks because the knoppix file is in a cramfs/cloop format. You have to either mount this file using the cloop package (insmod, mount module, etc) or you have to re-master the knoppix file with the changed dsl-config file in it using create_compressed_fs.

Hope this helps,
Chris Hoekstra

original here.