Re: Disk File's

[Goswin Brederlow <goswin.brederlow@student.uni-tuebingen.de>]

Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@brown.edu> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 18, 2000 at 10:56:57AM +0900, Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp> was heard to say:
> > The hard part is booting the kernel. I can't think up on a way of booting a kernel on
> > a loopback device.
> 
>   It feels like you should (?) be able to do this with some sort of initrd
> trick.  I was actualy experimenting with this (not really for booting from
> Windows, mainly just for my own amusement) but never got it really working..

My demofs (to be published when 2.4 comes out) does exactly
that. Actaulyl it is realy simple to do:

- boot with initrd
- mount /proc
- mount /dev/<disk with loobpack file> /mnt
- losetup /dev/loop0 /mnt/<file>
- echo 0x700 >/proc/sys/kernel/real-root-dev
- exit

I also have some patches for the bootfloppies to use this little trick
to start the newly installed system without reboot. I just hope they
take it.

May the Source be with you.
                        Goswin