Can "toram" be the default?

Forum: Other Help Topics
Topic: Can "toram" be the default?
started by: mosquito

Posted by mosquito on Oct. 23 2006,02:48

I'm a DSL user of 3 days, but so far I'm lovin' it..!

I am using it on a diskless laptop (an old one that doesn't support boot from USB), booting from CD. I want it diskless to keep the noise down (I'm making an "always on" digital picture frame)

What I'd like to know is... is there a way I can make the cheatcode toram the default rather than having to enter it at boot time...? This way the user can simply press the power-on button (and I can dispense with the keyboard)

I have tried to use a floppy with grub on it, but can't seem to "see" the CDROM...

Any ideas?

Cheers
Andrew

Posted by mikshaw on Oct. 23 2006,03:42

do a remaster of the ISO, adding toram to the default boot string in boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg (i think that's the right path...something like that anyway)

Posted by mosquito on Oct. 24 2006,06:35

Thanks for that... it has got me one step closer... I did a remaster and burned a new CD, but it wouldn't boot on the target computer... It simply spun the CD up and hung..! I tried it several times... and tried leaving it for 5 minutes... No joy.

I can boot the original CD on the target computer no problem

So I tried the remastered CD on two other computers and it worked fine on both (with my extensions and my "toram" option...)

Any clues where I should look now?

Cheers
Andrew

Posted by humpty on Oct. 24 2006,18:17

you don't need grub on the floppy. the bootfloppy.img should work.

why not buy a compact flash card + CF/ide adapter ($3), then stick it in the harddisk slot?

Posted by mosquito on Oct. 29 2006,01:54

I finally cracked this one (after making a number of coffee coasters :-).

The mkmydsl script, when is makes the iso image (via mkisofs), uses "-boot-load-size 32"... whereas the remastering "how to" guides use a value of 4.

A bit of googling shows that some older bios can only handle -boot-load-size 4... so I changed the value in mkmydsl, remastered the CD and it booted just fine..!

Thanks for the suggestion about using an ide/cf adapter, but in my country (New Zealand) they want to charge me $48 for one...!

Cheers
Andrew

Posted by roberts on Oct. 29 2006,02:13

Andrew, I checked my master image build scripts and they are indeed 4 and not 32. I am making the adjustment from 32 to 4 in mkmydsl. Also, I am creating a sister script to this for 3.1
Thanks for the update.