[syslinux] Syslinux: Multi-Disks [feature]

[Christian Marg]

Clifford Wolf wrote:

>We - as most other distributions too - are running in the problem that
>even minimalistc kernels are slowly growing and sometimes don't fit on
>1.44 MB floppies anymore.
>  
>
The following  is of course no solution for the kernel size growing 
beyond 1.44MB.

>A possible solution would be to teach the boot loader how to load a kernel
>image which is splitted over multiple disks. Something like:
>
>	Loading vmlinuz ............................................
>	* Please insert next disk *
>	Loading vmlinuz ............................................
>	* Please insert next disk *
>	Loading vmlinuz ............................  Ready.
>	Loading initrd.img .....
>	* Please insert next disk *
>	Loading initrd.img ............... Ready.
>
>That would be a _really_ cool syslinux feature. But please don't ask me to
>send you a patch - I've not been writing real-mode assembler for over ten
>years now ....
>  
>
Perhaps you shouldn't try to get that from your Bootloader. Initrd was 
afaik for having a minimalistic system before the System boots:
Load the Kernel from the first floppy (Prepaired according to Bootdisk 
HOWto; the older kernels did support: dd if=vmlinuz of=/dev/fd0)
Load a small initrd from the second floppy, let the init from the initrd 
load the root filesystem of your distributions installer. (using for 
example gunzip -c | dd -skip  1440 bs=1k of=/dev/ram0; Read Manpage for 
parameters, I didn't look them up now.)

I used a similar approach once using /dev/ram0 for the first disk and 
/dev/ram1 for the second disk, mounting ram0 as / and ram1 as /usr

bye
Christian