Re: Unresolvable installation problem?
On Mon, 5 Nov 2001 18:53, Harry Palmer wrote:
> I have a (decent, 400MHz PII) laptop with no CDROM and an LS120 IDE
> floppy drive instead of a standard floppy (which boot disks pick up as
> hdd).
>
> Is that me stuffed as far as getting potato up and running? I tried a
> few things with the idepci boot set, but there doesn't seem to be a
> way of getting beyond the first boot floppy and getting the root
> filesystem loaded. Has anybody been here before?
Couldn't you reconfigure the boot disk to use root=/dev/hdd? From memory the
Potato boot disk uses loadlin so it should be easy to change the
specification for the root device.
One thing I have been considering is to create a NFS-root floppy for laptops.
This would involve an initrd kernel using busybox (or some other statically
linked program with lots of utilities) with cardmgr compiled in. Then the
/linuxrc could start pcmcia, put the network up, and have a network start
script that mounts NFS and does pivot_root and "exec /sbin/init". This can
only be done with woody, however the image on the NFS server could be any
version of Linux as long as it doesn't stop the PCMCIA... ;)
To do this I need to squeeze the kernel modules necessary and all the cardmgr
stuff into 440K of gzip -9 compressed space.
If you're interested in testing this then let me know.
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