Maintenance Toram Install

From DSL Wiki

I use Ubuntu as my main OS, and I needed to have a way to run maintenance tasks (fsck of the root partition); so I thought I'd try DSL, unpacked on the same partition as the Ubuntu system. This is what I did:

  1. Boot into Ubuntu Single User mode (recovery mode)
  2. Getting a window with several choices, choosing ""netroot - Drop to root shell prompt with networking""
  3. getting a prompt shell in /root directory; execute the following: 
wget ftp://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/damnsmall/current/dsl-4.4.10-initrd.iso
mkdir /tmp/dsl-cd
mount /root/dsl-4.4.10-initrd.iso /tmp/dsl-cd/ -o loop
mkdir /root/dsl
cp -vR /tmp/dsl-cd/boot/ /root/dsl
nano /boot/grub/menu.lst
sync
shutdown -r now

And in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file, add: 

# DSL
title		Damn Small Linux - Maintenance toram
kernel		/root/dsl/boot/isolinux/linux24 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init ro lang=us toram noeject frugal
initrd		/root/dsl/boot/isolinux/minirt24.gz
boot

After reboot, choose the DSL entry - DSL should load to ram, leaving the Ubuntu root partition unmounted.


References:

  1. GRUB tips and tricks
  2. Install to USB From within Linux - Method III: Using GRUB as boot loader
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