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Hi folks. I’m new to this list, and pretty new to linux, although I used to do a fair amount of work around unix many years ago, so I have a grasp of some of the fundamentals.
I have a Dell Vostro 200 with no OS (well, freedos actually), and I want to figure out how to get linux onto it. I currently only have windows systems to work from. My plan was this: from windows, use syslinux on a USB memory stick, copy memdisk and a debian-live image to it, and boot memdisk to load the debian-live image as a ramdisk to then “really” boot off of. However, it seems to not actually quite work. But almost…
When I turn on the machine, memdisk runs, creates the ramdisk, boots from it, and then successfully brings up the debian-live boot screen. I accept the default, and the boot process starts. But…
When using “debian-live-lenny-amd64-standard.img”, … lots of boot messages displayed … “Begin: Mounting root file system …” … few more messages “Begin: Running /scripts/live-premount … done.” Then 40 repeats of: “/init: line 1: cannot open /dev/scd0: No medium found” and then: “BOOT FAILED” then some boilerplate stuff, then “live-initramfs will now start a shell. The error message was:” “ Unable to find a medium containing a live file system”
Then it left me in BusyBox (took me a while to figure out what that was!).
When I tried using “debian-live-etch-amd64-standard.img”, the result was very similar, except it didn’t have the “no medium found” messages.
So,… is debian-live supported running from memdisk? Is there something I can tweak to fix it? Or is it a non-starter?
(BTW, this is a bit of a learning project for me, so I don’t mind taking a few detours here and there. My next experiment is to run the regular debian installer via memdisk.)
Thanks for any info!
Alex Dommasch
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