Re: Loadlin under Config.sys -- AAAAGH!
Avid LinuxHacker wrote:
>Man pages and user guides have turned me bug eyed these last three months. This is my first
>attempt at perfroming a Linux installation and I am totaly lost. Here is my situation;
>
>My machine is an old 200 mHz "all in one" with two hard drives and an internal modem (56K vanilla
>generic) and 128 meg of RAM. The first hard drive is a tiny 16 meg drive with MSDOS running on it
>and about 8-9 meg of empty space. The second hard drive is a 12 gig drive that has been
>partitioned into two section. The first partition (5 gig) is primary and presently running Win
>98. The second partition (7 gig) is unused and unformated. The machine has NO "A" drive, NO
>CD-ROM drive and NO externally bootable devices period.
>
>My approach to this has been to boot the minimalist linux kernal by way of Loadlin and initrd
>under config.sys and then download all necessary parts to do a clean instal of Debian. I am
>having a real problem determining what files I really need to put on the mini HD to do this and
>most of all what the config.sys file lines should read. At this point a few lines of config.sys
>DOS code examples would be worth a thousand manpages.
>
>
An empty AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS will be your best bet. Just boot
into bare, minimum DOS, then run the LOADLIN executable, using the line
in INSTALL.BAT as your basic example.
It's my understanding that the LOADLIN method is deprecated, in favor of
using LILO or GRUB, as per
http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/ch04s05.html.en
Of course, this method depends on having a method for booting from LILO
or GRUB, and since you have no method of booting from anything but the
hard drive, probably won't work for you.
LOADLIN, IIRC, can't boot into an INITRD image, which most recent
versions of Debian use; therefore you're going to have to start with an
older version of Debian, with an older all-in-one kernel.
I'd probably start with the files at
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/Debian3.0r6/main/disks-i386/current/images-1.44/;
it's been a while, but I'd grab the four "driver-?.bin" files, the
"rescue.bin" and "root.bin" files. If you get an error about LOADLIN not
being able to boot this configuration, I'd go back to this site, and
traverse up the directory tree and to /debian/dist and see if I could
find an even older set of files. If that fails, you may have to resort
to tftp booting and/or put in a floppy temporarily on your old 200MHz
box, just long enough to get the install started with a GRUB floppy.
--
Kent
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