Re: Unresolvable installation problem?
On Mon, Nov 05, 2001 at 08:03:01AM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
| 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.
I thought it used LILO. The first screen certainly looks like lilo as
used by RH 6.1 and 7.0 to me.
| 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.
This sounds quite interesting. Would it be possible to test it (aside
from the PCMCIA) with a desktop machine? I've got an old system with
an ne2k nic that I would like to set up as a diskless terminal. So
far I've gotten stuck in getting it to recognize my other machine as
having an NFS server. This would be a good way to determine which
side the problem is on (since, presumably, you know what you're doing
and would have the client correct :-))
-D
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