Re: Booting to floppy
Michael Schmitz wrote:
>
> > > syslinux actually. and it can take a root= argument but if you don't
> > > give a root= argument you get a root disk prompt.
> >
> > Yeah, that's what I said/meant. The boot-floppy-hfs.img floppy
> > doesn't work the same way as the rescue floppy does for other
> > architectures. My point is that for powerpc, the "rescue" function
>
> The 'rescue floppy' doesn't even work as this on a whole other bunch of
> architectures I bet. Can you boot from this floppy on sparc? Alpha might
> work. None of the m68k machines will boot from it if you happened to kill
> the machine's old OS.
> Call it 'kernel floppy image' and emphasize that there's no need to copy
> it to a floppy disk on those architecures that can't boot from floppy, and
> maybe people will understand.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that in fact the rescue floppy is
bootable on any arch that can boot a CD. Because the bootable part
of the CD is really just the rescue floppy image. So technically
what prevents this from booting on new world macs is that they don't
have floppy drives. But a very slightly modified rescue floppy
image is the bootable part of the CD. It even says thanks for
booting the rescue floppy or somesuch when you boot the CD. Or last
time I actually read what it says, it did.
> > That one-size-fits-all install doc is truely evil, even with all the
> arch-specific customizations. True, once you're booted into the installer
> it works the same for all architectures. The steps leading up to that are
> just too different.
>
> Alternatives? We used to have a separate quick reference style install
> guide for installation on Amiga, Atari, Mac and perhaps VME on m68k. That
> was considered a bad idea by the boot-floppies team, and we tried to fold
> the specific 'what files to get, how to boot' instructions into the
> generic docs. Confusion ensued.
And hilarity.
> I now think having separate documents that
> detail the initial steps (choice of install method, partitioning,
> reinstalling your OS, what install files to get, how to unpack them, how to
> boot the installer, how to boot into the installed system finally) would be
> the easiest way to solve the problem. For PPC, separate descriptions for
> oldworld (miboot or BootX) and newworld (yaboot) as well as CHRP/PREP and
> other flavors might make sense.
What I was thinking was that a more sophisticated method for
generating the docs could be utilized. Something that would pull
arch specific sections from the right places and insert them into
the doc just before placing that doc at its intended destination,
like on the CD for a particular arch or in the right place on the
web site.
a
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