Arch Linux

rasat

Forum Fellow

From: Finland, working in Romania

Registered: 2002-12-27

Posts: 2,293

Website

Bootable floppy for live CD

There are requests booting the live CD with floppy. The codes are suppose to be similar when booting to an existing HD partition with floppy not using LILO.

<b>An example making a normal bootable floppy without LILO:</b>
fdformat /dev/fd0h1440 <i>(formats the floppy disk)</i>
dd if=/boot/vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0 <i>(writes the kernel to the floppy disk)</i>
rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/hda3 <i>(root partition as /dev/hda3)</i>
rdev -R /dev/fd0 1 <i> (mount root file system read-only)</i>

LIve CD replaces the HD, boot floppy needs to mount into CD instead. The problem I am facing, live CD's initrd image (a compressed file "miniroot.gz" 2.6Mb with all basic folders and startup files) doesn't fit on a normal floppy and must be uncompressed into ram memory at boot from the CD. How to do it?

<b>Here is the print of Live CD's isolinux.cfg:</b>
prompt 1
timeout 0
display boot.msg
F1 boot.msg
F2 info.msg
F3 vga.msg
default vmlinuz initrd=miniroot.gz init=/init/sbin/init ramdisk_size=100000 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 vga=788 root=/dev/ram0

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Markku

rasat

Forum Fellow

From: Finland, working in Romania

Registered: 2002-12-27

Posts: 2,293

Website

Re: Bootable floppy for live CD

The codes are suppose to be similar when booting to an existing HD partition with floppy...

I have searched around internet for floppy bootable live CDs, and found Honung Linux (not live CD but planning to do).
<i>It will not be a Live-CD in that that it will boot directly from the cd.
I'm planning to boot from a floppy (as Honung does now), but instead of using
the Rootdisk (Disk2) it will use a CD and it will therefor be possible for
me to get even more into the distribution.</i>
http://honung.n3.net/

Actually the Disk2 is some kind of "live floppy". Why not make an "AL Live Floppy" instead of bootable floppy for Live CD only. Moreover, are there any i686 machines what don't have a bootable CD bios?? I think its only an i586 issue... if am correct.

The idea to have a Live Floppy is for dial-up modem users.

FMI, how many MBs is a modem 56k user be willing to download? Minimum 2x floppy image... 2.8Mb each. To run AL with light weight desktop (blackbox or fluxbox) requires to download one CD image. What would be an accepted size to download (MB???).

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Markku

Mork II

Member

From: Visby, Sweden

Registered: 2003-05-14

Posts: 87

Re: Bootable floppy for live CD

Floppies are fun. But you really need to cut out big stuff. Are you thinking "floppy to build a minimal system from" or "floppy to run"? The previous should do with:Kernel, glibc, bash, pacman, dhcpcd, ppp, nano, iptables. The latter would need more fun stuff like links, mutt etc..

I'm on sweet sweet HDSL right now but was restricted to a (crappy) 56k modem during the summer. Thinking back a week I (or the modem) would tolerate max a 6 mb download.

rasat

Forum Fellow

From: Finland, working in Romania

Registered: 2002-12-27

Posts: 2,293

Website

Re: Bootable floppy for live CD

... would tolerate max a 6 mb download.

Floppy Boot Disk image  = 2.8Mb
Floppy Miniroot Disk image = 2.8Mb
CD iso image = 6Mb
-------------------------------
Toatal 11.6Mb (compressed) ---> uncompress appx. 31Mb.

Without X-windows a mini Arch Linux can easily run with quite many packages. Blackbox or Fluxbox would also not be a problem as long as we are able to reduce the XFree86 package into basic... though currently I don't know what it woud be (xfree86-4.3.0-5.pkg.tar.gz = 54Mb) .

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Markku

MasterC

Member

Registered: 2003-08-10

Posts: 11

Re: Bootable floppy for live CD

Wow, that looks good!    I'm also on DSL, but I know that when I'm at a friends on dial up, if I have to d/l more than about 10MB, I wanna just give up and shut off the computer.

Cool