RE: Bootable CD

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Fri, 10 Aug 2001, BERNARDES,JOAN (Non-HP-Brazil,ex1) wrote:

> 	Yes, I have used syslinux to boot the CD, but my initrd.gz it's the
> problem. I don't know how to mount the real root in the CD after starting
> initrd.
> 	Do you know where is the initrd in the Debian cd? I found the
> root.bin in the CD , but I tried to move to a floppy using rawrite and dd
> but I still can't mount the floppy.

That's because it's not a filesystem image but a gzipped filesystem image:

wouter@rock:~$ file root.bin
root.bin: gzip compressed data, deflated, last modified: Sun Apr 15 02:22:49 2001, max compression, os: Unix
wouter@rock:~$ gunzip -S .bin root.bin
wouter@rock:~$ file root
root: Linux rev 1.0 ext2 filesystem data
wouter@rock:~$

And this is a root-filesystem. You can mount it using the loopback block
device (so that you don't need a floppy of ~3MB ;-) :

mount -o loop -t ext2 root /mnt/whatever
ls -l /mnt/whatever

You will need support for the loopback block device, though (no idea
whether default Debian kernels provide that).
<snip>

-- 
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas dot be

"Human knowledge belongs to the world"
  -- from the movie "Antitrust"