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Topic: Attemps with non-bootable cd drive and .iso, The quest to make it work, dammit< Next Oldest | Next Newest >
Herix Offline





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Joined: May 2004
Posted: May 03 2004,20:12 QUOTE

Hello you all !

Just to set the picture, let's say I'm poor and new to Linux. Those are good reasons to make me want to run DSL.
So far I didn't manage to get it to run, but I'm not to give up so easily. I take it as a personnal challenge to my IT degree and height years high-tech career ;-)

The technical picture now : I have one computer, hand-made out of various parts, based on an 1995 Compaq desktop. Processor is a P90, there is 64 Mo ram, 2 HD (resp. 2 Go and 6 Go), a CD-Rom reader (definitively not bootable), a floppy drive and a NIC card with permanet DSL internet connection. That thing is up and running, and runs Windows NT 4 Workstation pretty well. I definitely decided to keep WNT4.

I got tomrtbt, this quite excellent tools enable to boot and run the simpliest Linux from just one diskette. I used it to partition (fdisk) and format (mke2fs) my secondary HD, which is now visible under Linux as hdb1. I can mount floppy, cd-rom and Windows partitions whenever I need it. I downloaded the DSL iso image, and eventually got it burned (on a Macintosh, don't ask me why). The CD holds only one big .iso file, wich, as I understand through my reading of the numerous posts, won't help me much.
I also downloaded Winimageso as to be able to read the content of the .iso file, and also bootpartwith the intent to enable Win+Linux double boot. This bootpart tool may well not be necessary, as far as I understant what Lilo is supposed to do.
I browsed through numerous forums and how-to and made many attempts, but none succeded. I can't yet run DSL at all, not  even talking yet about double-boot.
But I have a strong inclination to think that it /is/ possible. Moreover, I have the fallacious intuition that it shoudln't be too painful, provided you use the right tool at the right moment.
I am just about to make a further attempt, I'll keep you updated with the results.

Do I need to mention that any suggestion is warmly welcome ?

As for now, I intent to proceed like that :

1) remove all stubs from previous attempts, keeping only the much valuable tomsrtbt floppy and the big .iso file on cd-rom, and of course keeping my clean ext3 partition known as hdb1.

2) read the cd-rom with Winimage, so as to make a C:\Knoppix folder and copy the boot.img somewhere, both in the NTSF partion.

3) boot from tomsrtbt floppy , and dd the boot.img file onto a blank, dos-formated floppy

--------------- so far, I can't be wrong, can I ? ------

4) boot from the boot.img copy and see what happens.
(note that this is my third reboot, and I'm only at step 4, not bad for a system adveertized as easy-does-it ;-) or perhaps it's me ? ...)

5) If step 4 does not succeed in loading and running DSL, fumble through the lilo.conf so as to point the loader toward things where they really are. The mess begins here, since I quite don't know what's supposed to be the boot directory and the root directory, and where the hell I will manage to find some boot.b and the like.
----if anybody holds a streamlined lilo.conf I could use in those circonstences, //please// post here, thanx.

6) if one of step 4 or 5 succeeds, perform a dsl-hdinstall the way it is supposed to be done.

7)go to bed whatever

8) if no success from above steps, pursue my quest of a linux distrib suitable for my paleodesktop.

be well and see you later

Herix


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Herix Offline





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Posted: May 03 2004,22:46 QUOTE

back to windows to post an update :

Step 1 to 3 went ok. Now ...

<<4) boot from the boot.img copy and see what happens.>>
DSL starts booting from diskette but finaly fails, but finaly fails after not finding any CD (no wonder)
I went thru the F2 options, including fromhd /dev/hda1 : no way
After rebooting with tomsrtbt, copied the KNOPPIX file to my /dev/hdb1 ext2 partition, and booted again with dsl floppy, again going throught F2 options : no way.

Tried to edit the syslinux.cfg : it seems to me that this file somehow describes the boot sequence. Found that all disks were described as scsi, and since my own HDs are not scsi, tried to append a section mentionning hda and hdb as ide. No way.

Now going to bed as planned. Tomorrow morning first thing I'll try and burn another CD with a full image, not just one big damnsmall-0.6.3.iso file. If it doesn't work either, I may try the hard way : open the box and physically mount my second disk as primary disk, including moving jumpers around. Dual boot will then become far less casual than striking an arrow key :-(

about planned step 5 :
<<5)fumble through the lilo.conf >>
didn't find any lilo.conf to edit, hence my attempt at syslinux.cfg
There must be an OS loader somewhere on the dsl floppy, but where ? Are its setting editable ?


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ke4nt1 Offline





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Posted: May 04 2004,00:06 QUOTE

Burning your .iso as a FILE on a cdr is the cause of your difficulty.
Similar to writing your boot.img FILE to a floppy

Burn your .iso IMAGE to a cdr, similar to writing your
boot.img IMAGE to a floppy.

Your .iso IS a cdr IMAGE file..
Your .img IS a floppy IMAGE file.

Even if you can't BOOT from the cdr, you still need to
write the IMAGE to a cdr.

That's how I do it, anyway..  I'm sure there IS a way
to mount the .iso image, and cloop, or chroot it to make it
run, with an existing linux install already present, but I won't
be much help to you there..

If you were successful in using winimage to open the .iso file,
did you try copying the KNOPPIX "folder" - not the file - to your /dev/hdb1 ??  then using F2 - fromhd /dev/hdb1 ??


Hope it helps...

73
ke4nt
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cbagger01 Offline





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Joined: Oct. 2003
Posted: May 04 2004,03:29 QUOTE

I don't think that the "Copy the \KNOPPIX folder to your C:\ drive" approach will work with NTFS systems.  I know that it works with Windows 95 and Windows 98 which have FAT and FAT32 file systems.

There are two alternatives that may work:

Option 1:
Take your *.iso file and burn it to a CD-R disk (NOT a CD-RW disk. Some older drives have problems with CD-RW disks).  Use a third party CD burning software like Nero or Easy CD Creator.  You MUST use the menu choice File ----> Burn image or some other similar command like "Burn an image file" or "Burn an ISO file".

Then download a DOS/Windows utility programcalled rawrite.exe or rawrite32.exe
You can find it on Google.com or you can get it here:
http://www.duskware.com/rawrite32/download.html

Use the rawrite program with a blank 1.44MB floppy disk to create a floppy boot disk. Follow the instructions that are provided with the program and choose this as the source file name  where "F:" is replaced with your CDROM drive letter:
F:\KNOPPIX\boot.img

Then stick the CD-R into your CDROM drive, insert the floppy into your floppy drive and you should be able to boot up DSL from the floppy disk. You may have difficulty finding the CDROM drive if it is not an IDE/ATAPI drive.  If this drive is the kind that only works if the ribbon cable is plugged into a specific kind of sound card then the floppy boot disk will fail to detect the CDROM drive.

In that case, there is option 2:

While booted up in Windows NT, copy your F:\KNOPPIX folder over to your NTFS drive (IE C:\ Drive)
Then boot into Tom's root boot linux. Use it to copy the \KNOPPIX folder over to your hdb1 Linux partition.  As an alternative, you can also delete the partition and create a new partition:
hdb1 (64MB EXT2 Linux partition OR 64MB MSDOS FAT partition) for the storage of your \KNOPPIX files
Then leave the rest of the disk as unpartitioned space so that you can create new partitions later on as part of the DSL hard disk install process.  Or you can keep your existing hdb1 partition for now but it may complicate the hard disk install process.

Regardless of your choice, your next step is to stick in your DSL boot floppy and reboot.  The boot floppy will find /dev/hdb1 and it will pretend that it is a CDROM drive.  It will then load up DSL for you.

Good Luck.
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