Re: [TCLUG:19968] Bootable Image Lilo and CDRW

[Mike Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

Jonathan Kline wrote:
> 
> Okay heres the deal:
>     I need/want to make myself a system admin disk. I want it bootable and
> able to boot linux(maybe the bbc), dos, and a memory checker whichs can be
> booted through lilo.  Has anyone ever written lilo to a cdr or cdrw? Once I
> get the bootable stuff done, I need to add some other files, and sys admin
> tools, like fdisk, format.... Ghost, Drive Image.................  Most of
> the stuff I need from a day to day bais.  I want this cd to be the bomb.
> Anyone have any ideas as to how to do the bootable thing with dos, linux and
> the memory manger?

Well, this shouldn't be that hard.  To start off, make a directory on a
Linux box where you want to put everything together.  I'd fill it with a
minimal filesystem of utilities and whatnot.  I presume you'll be using
a regular 5" CD?  You can afford to dump a lot of stuff in there.  The
boot scripts will take a lot of fiddling (but hey, that's what CD-RW's
are for ;-)  Print out the man pages for init and other basic system
programs and read them thoroughly.  Take a lot of notes, etc..

In addition to all of this Linux stuff, create a directory named DOS or
some other obvious name.  dump DOS fdisk, format, etc. in there.  You
can also create a UTILS subdirectory for all of the DOS utilities you
want to use.  It would probably be a good idea to put LOADLIN.EXE in
that directory as well.

At some point, you had to make a diskette to get this whole thing to
boot.  I'd recommend making a DOS diskette that includes the drivers
necessary for reading your CDROM.  You don't really need anything else
on that disk, as you can put any other utilities (mouse drivers, etc) on
the CD itself, and it makes for a faster boot when you read as little as
possible from the diskette.  After a while, you'll get brave and make an
image of the diskette (dd is your friend).  You can include that image
when you run mkisofs or whatever program you run to make the ISO image
from that directory structure you made up above.  Your CD will now boot
DOS.  You can get it to boot Linux with a batch file that calls LOADLIN
with the correct parameters (oops, I almost forgot, you have to put a
linux kernel somewhere on the CD).  The LinuxCare BBC has some routines
for automatically figuring out where the root filesystem is.  You'd have
to modify that to look for an iso9660 filesystem instead of ext2, but
that shouldn't be a big problem.

Of course, if you're feeling masochistic, you can put the whole Linux
filesystem into a (possibly compressed) image.  I don't think that's
really necessary unless you really want to cram a huge amount of data
onto the disc.

Keep in mind that I've never actually done this..

-- 
 _  _  _  _ _  ___    _ _  _  ___ _ _  __   Why do we wash bath 
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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]