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Topic: frugal install - need help with boot options

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jephwood

Group: Members
Posts: 2
Joined: Mar. 2006

Posted: Mar. 30 2006,15:56

Hello everyone,

I have been butting my head against the wall for the last 2 days trying to fix this problem, and I'm hoping someone here can help me.

Here's my setup: I'm using DSL 2.3. I have a laptop with a 55 MB partition at hda1 (for the OS), and a 9 GB partition at hda3 (for persistent data). I use grub as my bootloader.

First, is 55 MB enough for the boot partition? Perhaps this is where my problem lies.

Second, I've been trying to find the right combination of boot options that do all of the following:
1) Use the "toram" option, so everything runs faster
2) Load the MyDSL apps I have at /mnt/hda3/home/dsl/mydsl
3) Mount my persistent /home and /opt directories at hda3
4) NOT force my system to restore and backup the potentially large hda3 every time I reboot
5) make it so that grub's menu.lst is writeable. (It currently gets loaded under KNOPPIX/boot/grub/menu.lst, where it's not writeable)

Currently, I can get all but 5) to work with (after frugal) "toram mydsl=hda3/home/dsl/mydsl home=hda3 opt=hda3 restore=hda1". But even with this, I have to manually backup hda1, or else the next time I reboot, it hangs on "restoring backup files from /mnt/hda1", usually because on shutdown, it says it's run out of room to backup files.

Thanks, any help would be appreciated.

--Jeff

anaconda

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Posts: 96
Joined: Mar. 2006

Posted: Mar. 30 2006,19:21

5. Editing menu.lst:
You can edit the menu.lst by booting from somewhere else than the hd and then mounting hda1. Now you can edit the menu.lst (if you are root) :;):

You can boot from DSL cd or some 1 floppy linux distro.. or whatever..

Quote

4) NOT force my system to restore and backup the potentially large hda3 every time I reboot

This is wrong.

And why do you use restore=hda1 ?? when you obiviously want to use restore=hda3 !! the latter means that you want to save changes and settings to hda3 (not that you want to "bacup" hda3 !)

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anaconda

doobit

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Posts: 912
Joined: July 2005

Posted: Mar. 30 2006,21:11

A good boot line is dsl vga=7xx toram noapm restore=hda3 home=hda3 opt=hda3 mydsl=hda3
That will create a persistant /home and /opt
Once you have a persistant /home and /opt , a writeable /boot/grub/menu.lst file will be available on hda3. Then you can place the above commands in that script.
You can edit hda3/boot/grub/menu.lst if you open it as root with a text editor, like nano.
Restore only backs up and restores settings, not actual apps. The apps remain where you put them once you have them on the hard drive. With DSL-2.3 you now have the option of a /mydsl folder on your hda3 as well and the apps you copy to that folder will automatically restore to the desktop when you boot.

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jephwood

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Joined: Mar. 2006

Posted: Mar. 31 2006,15:35

Thanks everyone for your help; I was finally able to solve this problem.

The relevant section of grub's menu.lst is now:
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi frugal dma toram restore=hda3 home=hda3 opt=hda3 mydsl=hda3/home/dsl/mydsl

When I need to change grub's menu.lst, I just "mount /dev/hda1" and edit it.

I also resized hda1 to 100 MB, but I don't think that mattered.

--Jeff

mikshaw

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Posts: 4856
Joined: July 2004

Posted: Mar. 31 2006,15:47

Quote (jephwood @ Mar. 30 2006,10:56)

2) Load the MyDSL apps I have at /mnt/hda3/home/dsl/mydsl

This can be accomplished with "home=hda3 mydsl=hda3/home/dsl/mydsl". This is exactly what i have in my grub, and it works fine. Putting mydsl apps on a separate journalling partition is my preference...I only ever need to write to the DSL partition when i upgrade.

You might want to edit .filetool.lst, removing "home/dsl" if it's still in there. Since you are using a persistent home there's no reason to back up files in that directory.

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4 replies since Mar. 30 2006,15:56

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