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Re: Use a CD-ROM as root?



On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, Edward Betts wrote:

> A lot of CD-ROMs are now ide, and are hence detected by the kernel.
> At the moment, when we do the first boot we use a combined boot and
> root disk. Could we just put the boot disk bit on the bootable bit
> of a CD-ROM, so we get the full a 1.44Mb kernel (plenty for anyone),
> and use the CD-ROM as the root disk? 
>[...]

I've tried to make a Debian installation based on a ramdisk and a live
fs on CDROM. The ramdisk contain:
- /dev and /etc
- /sbin/init, /lib/libc6 and a little executable that scan
  /dev/hd[abcdef] and /dev/scd0 for a CDROM, mount it and mount an
  internal live filesystem.
- /bin, /usr and so on as symlink to the live filesystem on CDROM

It need some work to adjust boot script, some area under /var, some
/etc/init.d scripts, but it already run lynx, mc and other interesting
tools without require the HD.

I attach the scan-cd program.


ciao

					Michele

-- 
Dalla Silvestra Michele      dalla@keycomm.it     dalla@debian.org
Key fingerprint = 68 02 A9 C7 FB 05 9E 9C  C7 B6 4A 13 61 25 5B 43


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`
end


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