Re: Windows multiboot (aaargh!)

[cr <cr@orcon.net.nz>]

On Monday 15 September 2003 18:52, Karsten M. Self wrote:
> on Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 09:23:47PM +1200, cr (cr@orcon.net.nz) wrote:
> > It'd be nice to have a self-contained floppy with just the basic
> > componenets needed to boot a Linux system, so there's room to add a
> > few utilties of ones choice.    I've done that with my DOS floppy.
> > But reading the HOWTOs, it seems that creating a Linux boot disk is a
> > rather more complex procedure.
>
> Trinux aims in this general direction.  The basic boot system is 2-3
> floppies, with the 2nd and later disks being used to add additional
> utilities to the system.
>
> Of course, if you start with a chroot install, you can use debootstrap
> and add as many Debian utilities as you want ;-)
>
> For most of us, a bootable CDROM is a more viable option.  I don't know
> if USB pen drives are bootable, but with 120-256 MiB RAM, these would be
> sufficiently large to be quite useable systems.  One issue here is the
> number of read-write cycles the systems allow.

What I was thinking of, solely for the purposes of quick swapping between DOS 
and Linux, was a floppy with an absolutely minimal kernel on it, to which I 
could add the one app I really wanted - cfdisk - just to tweak the partition 
types.    As it is, RIP boots reasonably quickly and has fdisk which will do.

However, I'll have a Google for Trinux and check it out.   

> > I guess the workaround is to use one of the pre-made disks like tomsrtbt,
> > and just put my own utilities on a floppy that I can mount afterwards.   
> > At least, unlike DOS-booted-from-a-floppy, I imagine the Linux rescue
> > systems don't constantly nag you to "Insert disk with COMMAND.COM in
> > Drive A:" or whatever the Linux equivalent would be   ;)
>
> No, you won't be prompted to insert disks, most (all, AFAIK) run in
> RAMdisks.  Running live from floppy is simply too slow.

Also of course, the images on all the rescue disks are much compressed and 
unpack into far more space in the RAMdisk.   DOS being a much smaller and 
more limited OS, can easily be fitted onto a boot floppy.

But because of that, the disks are full and I can't add anything else to 
them.   

> This limits you to 16 RAMdisks of 4096 KiB each, however.  The updated
> romfs actually resizes dynamically if I understand correctly (and
> probably don't).
>
>
> Peace.