Re: [NEWS] status of boot-flopppies
Moin Jason Gunthorpe,
> IMHO it is insane to have install disk == rescue disk - we throw away too
> much valuable space for tools like 'awk' 'sed' etc etc. A seperate rescue
> floppy with a more complete toolset is a much smart idea. SuSE does this
> well, the install floppy lets you load modules and things and then it
> somehow 'chain boots' to the sperate rescue floppy which has a
> surprisingly complete system! It had ifconfig, route ftp ping, bash (!!)
> etc.
What I would like from a Boot-CDROM (who the f*ck is still using floppys :-)
is the following start screen to chose between several 2,8MB installations:
So we could talk about several boot-floppys being on one CDROM, if we
want to test them, without wasting the spindle pile.
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------#
Press <RETURN> to load the CDROM into ram as '/'. This is the
first step in doing a normal installation or upgrade.
Type 'network' to boot the system from network using nfs.
Type 'rescue<RETURN>' to install a rescue system into the swapspace of
a the primary harddisk. Recue will relabel the disk using LILO, so
you can reboot from disk, to repair the system.
Type 'lowmem<RETURN>' to boot with the CDROM as root. This is the
first step in installing or upgrading a machine with less than
16mb of memory.
Type 'linux root=xxx <RETURN>' to mount a hard disk partition as '/'.
The value 'xxx' is printed for you during the installation or upgrade.
This is the second boot on machines with less than 16mb of memory, and
on other machines unless you install LILO on your hard disk.
Typical values for root: /dev/hda1: 301 /dev/hda2: 302
/dev/hdb1: 341 /dev/hdb3: 343
/dev/sda1: 801 /dev/sdb4: 814
#------------------------------------------------------------------------------#
The reasons for this choice:
- Mounting the installation as RAM disk should be the first choice,
when booting from CDROM. The casual user wants the "chicken proved"
allways press return to install the system. We should give him!
- The next choice is to use the CDROM just as a medium to load the
kernel and a minimal linux root file system, to mount the rest
from nfs, and to use the local the intranet Debian.org mirror,
which may be more actual than the boot cdrom :-)
- lowmem is a special thing, the CDROM should provide a root filesystem,
with a small ramdisk is mounted transparent over this file system. I
dont know, if this is yet possible with a linux kernel. I think we need
some loopback expert here ,-( The alternate would be mounting ram to
/var and providing symlinks for those files outside /var that may need
change.
- the last thing is for most importance. This should only load the
kernel from CDROM, and give him a partition as a read-only root.
Quite to often, this is the easiest repair.
BTW: Bakunin (my homestation, does'nt have a floppy but a WD8013-EPROM,
so I'm booting remote from the Sun, if anything fails :-)
Bye Michael
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