Other Help Topics :: boot from a zip drive & floppy

I finally was able to get dsl to boot from a liveZip. I'm posting this from a parallel port liveZip damn small linux!

The first thing I did was get the zip drive working from the liveCD so I could set it up. I used the following commands:

sudo su
mkdir /mnt/zip
modprobe ppa ### the drive needs both power & a disk here
mount /dev/sda4 /mnt/zippy ###you might have a different sda#

look at the drive and make sure it's nothing you want and make sure that you're looking at the real zip drive. When your sure it's nothing you want, unmount that drive and use cfdisk to repartition it. I made a 55 Meg primary partition type linux and made the rest a linux swap partition.

I rebooted at this point because cfdisk said to, I don't know if I needed to but I did.

Then I ran through the steps to get the zip drive working again and mounted sda1 (your number might be different). I copied the KNOPPIX folder to the zip drive with

cp -Rp /cdrom/KNOPPIX /mnt/zip/KNOPPIX

You need to be careful with zip drives for a few reasons. One is the speed. It isn't all copied until the disks stops spinning, and that takes about 2 minutes. You'll hear it. There is a lag between when you tell it to write and it actually does write. When it's done, umount zip and then remount it. Now run an md5sum on the /mnt/zip/knoppix/knoppix file. Yes, the filename is lower case now. Check that against the md5sum of the /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX file. If they don't match or you get an error, don't continue. Believe me, do it again until they match and remember to unmount and remount before you run the md5 or you'll get the right answer, but it won't be real. The disk is going to spin a while during the md5 sum, but not as long as the write time.

Now you need to make a boot disk. You need a good floppy. I ran

dd if=boot0.8.0.img of=/dev/fd0

We're almost there. Now copy three drivers from the live cd to the floppy:

mount /dev/fd0 mnt/floppy
cp /KNOPPIX/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/drivers/parport/parport.o /mnt/floppy
cp /KNOPPIX/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/drivers/parport/parport_pc.o /mnt/floppy
cp /KNOPPIX/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/drivers/scsi/ppa.o /mnt/floppy
umount /mnt/floppy

now boot to the floppy with the zip disk in the drive and turned on. At the boot prompt type expert.

say no to loading more scsi modules (unless you're an expert and really do that anyway)

say yes to loading additional modules from a disk (we put ours on the disk we have already so there's no need to swap disks)

when prompted for the names of the modules type parport.o parport_pc.o ppa.o in that order. You should see the machine find the zip drive. I didn't change any of the configurations after that (i said no to everything).

Then the screen loaded and here I am. I don't see my swap space, which I thought would have been great for low memory machines. I don't know why it didn't find that swap space at boot and use it.

EDIT: it didn't see the swap space because I never ran mkswap /dev/sda2 on it. I did that and it did see the swap on bootup.

Good job!

now try to edit the linuxrc in the minirt24.gz so it includes the loading of the extra modules.
copy the modules to minirt24 /modules.
then you may be able to boot withouht going expert mode?
.

I did that last night, but it was a lot of effort for something so easy. I feared the minirt. In the end though, I got it to from the boot command line as an option. Here's what I did with a working boot disk in the floppy drive:

Code Sample

mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy
cp /mnt/floppy/minirt24.gz .
gunzip minirt24.gz
mkdir test
mount -o loop minirt24 test
mkdir test/modules/parport
chmod 755 test/modules/parport
cp /KNOPPIX/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/drivers/parport/parport.o test/modules/parport/
cp /KNOPPIX/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/drivers/parport/parport_pc.o test/modules/parport/
cp /KNOPPIX/lib/modules/2.4.26/kernel/drivers/scsi/ppa.o test/modules/scsi/
chmod 755 test/modules/scsi/ppa.o
chmod 755 test/modules/parport/*

next I edited the linux rc file. I added the following three sections (I left some of the origional above and below each section so you can see where they go:

The first section looks for zipboot on the boot: command line (you need to actually type dsl zipboot to get it seen)

Code Sample

case "$CMDLINE" in *idecd*|*atapicd*) IDECD="yes";;; esac
case "$CMDLINE" in *noideraid*) NOIDERAID="yes";;; esac

###############################################################
# Check for the boot from zipdrive option
case "$CMDLINE" in *zipboot*) ZIPBOOT="yes";;; esac
###############################################################

KNOPPIX_DIR="KNOPPIX"
KNOPPIX_NAME="KNOPPIX"

The second section I added to linuxrc is a function that actually loads the modules:

Code Sample

test -n "$INTERACTIVE" && echo "0" > /proc/sys/kernel/printk
echo -n "${CRE}"
}

###############################################################
loadzip(){
echo -n "${CRE}${BLUE}Loading Zip Drive for booting...${NORMAL}"
$INSMOD -f /modules/parport/parport.o
$INSMOD -f /modules/parport/parport_pc.o
$INSMOD -f /modules/scsi/ppa.o
sleep 5
}
###############################################################

# Check for SCSI, use modules on bootfloppy first
if test -n "$INTERACTIVE"; then

The third section added to linuxrc check to see if you entered dsl zipboot on the command line, and if so runs the function that loads the modules that run the zip drive:

Code Sample

fi
# All interactively requested modules should be loaded now.

###############################################################
# Check for Zip Drive load
if test -n "$ZIPBOOT"; then
loadzip
fi
###############################################################

# Check for ide-scsi supported CD-Roms et al.
test -f /proc/scsi/scsi && FOUND_SCSI="yes"

then I ran:

Code Sample

umount test
gzip minirt24
cp minirt24.gz /mnt/floppy

and I had my zip drive bootable disk.

Well done!
good explanation.
clear scripting.
*****

Nice work, clacker. If you would email me your floppy image. And if these are additions, then I will post an updated boot floppy so others with zip drives can benefit.

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