winjimmy
Unregistered
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Posted: Feb. 01 2006,19:19 |
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| Quote (cyberoidx @ Jan. 30 2006,23:41) | | what if you suddenly lose your dataa? |
Perhaps a moment of satori would just as suddenly ensue . . . ?
Anyways, I've finally got this thing booting from a boot floppy: SUCCESS! (though with some limitations). My solution was as follows: make a bootable FreeDOS boot disk with only minimal files on it for booting the system; put a copy of loadlin on it; put the DSL kernel on it (linux24); put a specially-crafted initrd (that loads modules for, then initializes the USB drive) on the diskette. Put the USB drive into the right USB slot (seems dependent to some extent on the slot it was in when you did the HD install to it), boot from the diskette, then issue | Code Sample | | loadlin linux24 initrd=name-of-ur_initrd root=/dev/sdXX |
(XX gets replaced by the letter and partition number of your flash drive: mine was a1 [sda1]). Then, you're off to the races. Your drive should boot--mine does. Copying over the kernel and finding a copy of loadlin was small potatoes. The specially-crafted initrd was the more painful part. For the initrd, I appropriated one from a project called "Runt" that aims to run Slack from a USB flash drive. The site is at http://runt.mybox.org . He's got a boot floppy there that'll actually boot DSL installed on a flash drive as-is: problem is it uses the wrong kernel for DSL. So you won't be able to do much on the system. To do anything, you'll have to extract his initrd from the floppy image, unzip it, mount and edit it, then re-gzip it, finally copying it over to your boot floppy. I found helpful directions for editing the initrd at http://simonf.com/usb/#older . It has you mount the unzipped initrd as a loop filesystem. You use that same process to get the gzipped initrd out of the floppy image. If there's any real interest in doing this, I can provide more detailed directions. But I'm guessing most folks are happy enough with the live-CD-from-flash-drive method of running DSL from flash. It does, apparently, make your flash drive last alot longer to do it this way.
Caveats: booting DSL this way will undo alot of the plug-and-play happiness DSL brings. When you boot from floppy like I've described, it first of all mounts the disk read-only (ro). You can't do much with the system without making it read-write (rw). That's fairly easy to do, and the kernel even spits out a final message telling you how. On top of that, none of DSL/Knoppix's hardware detection wizardry works: all that resides in initrd's big brother--minirt.gz that regular DSL/Knoppix run on boot. What this means is that you'll have to load modules by hand to get all your hardware enabled and functioning (for exampe, your NIC). So, at present, it's not for the faint of heart or extremely inexperienced. But it works for me, and gives me what I want. Depending on response, I may post further to this thread. For those with a bit of experience and/or tenacity, you should be able to figure out all this on your own from what I've said here and the links I've provided.
Be aware that USB is picky. It may not be possible to do this on some computers, or it may take a great deal of experimentation and trouble-shooting to figure out how. YMMV.
James
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