Poor Man's Install to one NTFS partition; can it be done?

[SiKing]

Hi all,

I have been searching these formus (fora?) and the Knoppix wiki for a while now. I have found several different discussions regarding "Poor man's install". There are various theories on running Knoppix from one single HD partition, and I have managed to get it done myself ... from a FAT partition. My question is: can it be done from one single NTFS parition?

I know the answer must be someone around here ... perhaps I am just looking in the wrong place, perhaps this simply cannot be done. Can some kind sould give me a gentle shove in the right direction.

Thanx for looking.

[ruymbeke]

Hi all,
I have been searching these formus (fora?) and the Knoppix wiki for a while now. I have found several different discussions regarding "Poor man's install". There are various theories on running Knoppix from one single HD partition, and I have managed to get it done myself ... from a FAT partition. My question is: can it be done from one single NTFS parition?
I know the answer must be someone around here ... perhaps I am just looking in the wrong place, perhaps this simply cannot be done. Can some kind sould give me a gentle shove in the right direction.
Thanx for looking.
Yes I have done it and I use it evey day.
The trick is to use a special port of grub: grldr which is started from the Windows boot loader (ntldr) via an extra line in the boot.ini
and a new boot ramdisk: minirt_usb2.gz which includes and loads the ntfs linux kernel module
and also includes a patched linuxrc boot script to allow knoppix to boot from the iso cd image located in the ntfs partition.
Please have a look in here to find all the details about it:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=97923#97923
The minirt_usb2.gz boot ramdisk will also allow you to boot Knoppix from a ISO file located on fat12/16/32, ext2/3 or reiser partition.
Moreover, it will allow you to change the hostname of the machine with a fixed or dynamic name (network_hw_address or time)
and has a bug fix for using the USB2.0 kernel module on USB2.0 hardware (instead of always using the slow USB1 kernel module).
Cheers,
Gilles

[SiKing]

Thanx for the link and advice. However, I think I am still doing something wrong. :cry:

I got all the "preliminaries" done: grldr, installed grub in c:\boot\grub (or /dev/hda1/boot/grub, which is NTFS), got the KNOPPIX image and linux kernel in c:\boot\KNOPPIX along with your initrd file.
After booting Knoppix, I get up to


RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
RAMDISK: incomplete write (-28 != 32768) 4194304
Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(1,3)

So what now?

Very much appreciate your time and patience, SiKing.