Boot disk

pthread · Post by **pthread** » Fri May 21, 2004 12:38 pm

Hey anyone know how to boot into a cdrom distro on a comp that doesn't support cd booting? They don't make a particular boot disk for it, is there a generic one I can use?

Post by **dann** » Sun May 23, 2004 12:08 pm

I've tried this before and it is very difficult. Your best option may be to yank the hard drive and put it into a machine that will boot off of cd. Do the install and put the hard drive back.

What is the distro?

pthread · Post by **pthread** » Sun May 23, 2004 3:28 pm

Rocks

Post by **dann** » Mon May 24, 2004 2:52 am

You may be able to build a boot disk by bringing the boot image over from the cd to a floppy using dd. The problem here, though may be that the boot image may exceed the cd.

On the root of the cd may be a directory called isolinux which is where you will find some of the configuation files and such for booting.

Again, building a boot floppy like this is pretty tough and no guarantee that it will work. It may be faster for you to just pull the drive and install in another machine.

Post by **dann** » Mon May 24, 2004 11:34 am

I grabbed the 2.0 version of Rocks to check it out. Now I grabbed the minimal version, not desktop. I noticed that there is a directory called 2.0.0-rc5-x86-pentium-mmx-32-bootdisk-expert which holds floppy images under it. Does this not exist on your iso?

pthread · Post by **pthread** » Mon May 24, 2004 8:00 pm

Yeah I had checked what was on the cd, it was far to big.

2.0 is a really old version... 3.1 is the current. Think that I could edit it though? I had considered it because I know pre 2.3 (I believe) they had a boot disk. I just wasn't quite sure how to go about that.

Post by **dann** » Mon May 24, 2004 8:46 pm

No wait, I got rock linux, not rocks. I am dl'ding rocks now, 3.2 is the latest.

Post by **dann** » Mon May 24, 2004 11:17 pm

Okay, the big kicker is that the initrd.img is 5 megs in size. This would have to be split up across a number of disks. How to do this, I am not sure right now. There was a howto on creating Linux boot disks that might work in this case. If I recall, though, it was mainly about creating a single or dual boot, where root was on one disk and the kernel on another. Not having the initrd image spread across multiple disks.

That's a killer. Since you are going for a cluster here, I am not sure what the impact would be of pulling the hard drive out and doing the install on another machine.

If there is a way to having a boot disk kick off a cdrom install, now that would be the ideal way. I'm still looking.

pthread · Post by **pthread** » Tue May 25, 2004 7:53 pm

Yeah I tried googling for something that could use a generic boot disk to kick off a generic cdrom installer, but I couldn't find anything... I think my search terms were just too... generic...

Post by **dann** » Tue May 25, 2004 9:04 pm

My impression on how this is to be done would almost be like having another boot loader on floppy or something to kick off the cd. The cd works almost like having the boot floppy embedded in it so initrd, the kerenel, and all are on the same media. You cannot just have the kernel boot off the floppy and pass parameters to use the cdrom for all other stuff as if you were passing root=/dev/hda1 or something of the sort.

Perplexing.

pthread · Post by **pthread** » Wed May 26, 2004 12:06 am

Yeah, I am sure it is possible, but I certainly am not sure how.

neuro · Post by **neuro** » Thu May 27, 2004 9:26 pm

have a look at http://btmgr.sf.net/

pthread · Post by **pthread** » Fri May 28, 2004 1:33 am

Very nice, briefly took a look, I will give it an in depth look when I am sober.

PS - You will be flamed if it has nothing to do with what i want

.

neuro · Post by **neuro** » Fri May 28, 2004 10:53 am

bring it on

pthread · Post by **pthread** » Fri May 28, 2004 2:29 pm

This really actually looks like it could be what I need... I'll have to throw it together and try it out to see if it works as advertised, thanks!