Re: Strategy for boot-floppies
Martin Schulze <joey@finlandia.Infodrom.North.DE> writes:
> Thus I believe we should discuss our strategy.
Yup. I agree.
> This is what Haggie and myself were thinking about:
>
> . Booting via bootable CDROM
>
> Create a 2.88MB floppy to use as ElTorito boot image. This floppy
> will contain the kernel and the root image.
This sounds good. I wonder if certain BIOS's will puke on it.
> . Support for ftp/tftp fetching of the base system
This is an old wishlist. I believe it is pretty easy to implement
(just gotta watch out for available space, etc).
> . Splitting the rescue disk
>
> Since we are running into trouble we should face the truth and
> discuss if it would be wise to split the rescue disk into a boot
> disk and a root disk.
Yes, I believe this is inevitable.
> If so, would it be possible to fetch the root disk, i.e. the
> ramdisk, from the net? If so, how can we boot off of the boot
> floppy to achieve this?
I've used TFTP to do complete floppyless installation, including
boot/root/drivers, then installing the rest from a local CD. This is
already functional. I believe this is the only way to accomplish
this. We can make it much easier, however, for instance, packaging an
"install server" package that would run on the server, better
documentation, better DHCP/BOOTP integration and testing and
documentation.
> . Support for JAZZ/ZIP drives
>
> These drives are botable and may contain 100MB or even 250MB on
> it. The minimum we should support is a system that people can just
> copy to their disk and boot off of it.
>
> [ dbootstrap: is it possible to detect a jazz/zip drive? If so,
> look for drives, resc and base disks there without asking the
> user.]
For our own sanity, I think our model should just be the same 2.88 MB
image. It's a shame this doesn't work already -- it should, but there
is apparently no boot-floppies hacker with one of these. Could we get
a donation or the use of SPI funds?
> . Installation via loadlin
>
> I guess this way is not affected by a split since it loads root.bin
> separately already.
Try not to be so i386 centric. :)
See the "installation methods" chapter of the install manual for a
very thorough break-down of the "install phases". You might want to
look at the Sparc version or the m68k version, since I don't think
i386 supports some of the network installation systems that these
other architectures support.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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