[syslinux] Question concerning booting from Floppy Drive

Seth Kurtzberg seth at cql.com
Thu Jul 4 15:30:31 PDT 2002


Peter,

Can't he boot from the floppy, mount the CD file system as an iso9660 file 
system, and use the root pivot?

On Thursday 04 July 2002 12:37 pm, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> David Reimer wrote:
> > First I'd like to thank you, and everyone who has contributed to the
> > isolinux development. It has been the solution to many of my development
> > needs.
> >
> > Currently I am creating a Linux system that runs directly from CD.
> > Currently the CD is working and I am using isolinux to boot the CD. The
> > compressed kernel is approximately 2 meg and the compressed initial
> > ramdisk is approximately 4 meg. What I am interested in is using a
> > floppy to boot the kernel and initial ramdisk which are on the CD. Is
> > the a way to use a floppy to boot strap the isolinux system which is on
> > the CD, or if this is not possible, or just a bad idea is there a way to
> > boot the kernel and initial ramdisk on the CD using a floppy in some
> > other fashion. The reason I am interested in doing this is that many of
> > the systems that I currently have can not boot directly from CD and the
> > kernel and initial ramdisk are to big to fit on a floppy or floppies.
> > Unfortunately, loadlin is not a solution due to its kernel and ramdisk
> > size limitations. Any help you could offer would be greatly appreciated.
>
> It's not possible unless you go kernel hacking.  If you're not bootinf
> from a CD-ROM, the BIOS cannot talk to it.  You could make the kernel
> load a ramdisk from the CD -- this isn't an "initial ramdisk" anymore,
> since that is by definition is loaded by the boot loader -- but that is
> a custom kernel mod.
>
> 	-hpa
>
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-- 
Seth Kurtzberg
MIS Corp.
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