[lug] floppy install images

[Hugh Brown]

On Sat, 2003-12-20 at 16:54, Bear Giles wrote:
> Hugh Brown wrote:
> > Does anyone know of a way to take the two floppy images, make them into
> > one 2.88 image and put it on cdr (as the boot image)?
> 
> Yes, but not without a lot of work.
> 
> First some background... the first disk is a "boot" disk that 
> loads the kernel -- and it has to be understood by the BIOS on the 
> motherboard.  This often means that it's a FAT filesystem set up 
> as a bootable floppy, but instead of MSDOS.SYS or the like there's 
> a secondary bootloader that understands how to load the linux 
> kernel and initrd (initial ramdisk) image.  The initrd is a cramfs 
> image that can contain kernel modules, initialization scripts, and 
> various utilities.  At a minimum it usually contains mount/umount, 
> tar, gzip... and if you want a cheap rescue disk it will contain 
> busybox and a script that allows you to run the system out of the 
> initrd image.
> 
> The second disk is a "root" disk that, typically, is a minix 
> filesystem containing a compressed tarball containing the entire 
> filesystem that you'll see when you get a prompt.  The 'initrd' fs 
> mentioned earlier will be nowhere in sight.
> 
> Finally, an "el Torito" bootable CD will treat a 1.44M or 2.88M 
> section of the disk as a bootable floppy.  You can create a 
> suitable image with mkisofs with the -b flag (iirc), but obviously 
> the purpose of mkisofs is to create ISO9660 filesystems, not to 
> provide burnable images with arbitary filesystems on them.
> 
> So at a minimum you need to have some way to
> 
>    1) convert the "root" image so that it is an ISO9660 FS on CD 
> instead of a minix FS on 1.44M floppy,
> 
>    2) edit the "boot" image so that it knows to load the root 
> image from /dev/scd0 instead of /dev/fd0, something that requires 
> editing the linuxrc script in the initrd image in recent kernels, and
> 
>    3) verify that the kernel supports CD drives and ISO9660 file 
> systems.
> 
> Not impossible, but it'll require some serious twiddling with some 
> specialized tools (e.g., mkinitrd, mkcramfs, etc.)
> 
> Bear
> 

Thanks for all the input.  I wasn't clear in my original post.  I have
the floppies that are created from Partition Magic (I left the CD at
work) and want to use partition magic on this laptop (to resize the ntfs
partition and convert it back to fat32 so that it is rw from linux).

So I have two floppy images and now floppy drive.  I was hoping that I
could put them on a cd or a usb drive and use them that way.

Hugh











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