[debian-knoppix] Making a new miniroot.gz
Hello,
Yesterday in an attempt to make a knoppix boot floppy, (to boot a
/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX from harddisk) I made a new miniroot.gz of size less
than the standard. The file contents of it is same from the stock one
from knoppix CD + some USB drivers to make it boot from a usb stick. But
I was not able to boot from it, and balked out saig their is not
enough size left. Today I read the Custom Kernel Howto and it also says
along the same lines.
<quote>
Research miniroot a bit more and see what kernel mods may be necessary
to change it's size. Creating one that is anything but the original 3MB
seems to end badly for me.
</quote>
Any one knows why? I finally managed to make a boot floppy by simply
rawriting the boot.img, which I should have done long back :) But I want
to know why a minirot.gz that I created do not work? :(
I have noticed one more strange thing while creating the miniroot.gz, it
will be nice if some one here can explain it.
I created an ext2 filesystem on a file.
-rw-r--r-- 1 raj raj 1.0M Aug 16 01:09 miniroot
mke2fs -i 1024 -b 1024 -m 3 -F -v miniroot
gziped it and see the size..
-rw-r--r-- 1 raj raj 1360 Aug 16 01:11 miniroot.gz
mounted it and made a big file in it.
# mount -o loop miniroot /cdrom/
df -h
/home/raj/tmp/tmp/miniroot 891K 13K 848K 2% /cdrom
made a big file in it
dd if=/dev/urandom of=miniroot bs=1024 count=350
new df -h is
/home/raj/tmp/tmp/miniroot 891 366 495 43% /cdrom
umounted and gzipped the file again..
-rw-r--r-- 1 raj raj 361284 Aug 16 01:16 miniroot.gz
Now mounted it again removed the file and then umounted and gzipped..
-rw-r--r-- 1 raj raj 361283 Aug 16 01:17 miniroot.gz
Their is only a small difference. I fully filled the filesystem with
zero bytes file and then erased them. and agin umounted and checked the
size..
-rw-r--r-- 1 raj raj 339770 Aug 16 01:26 miniroot.gz
Still it is big. Any one knows why this is happening? I was quite amazed
by this. :)
raj
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