Re: NO! NO! NO! The floppy drive must DIE! :)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave_Bechtel
--If you just need quick-and-dirty stuff w/o Reiserfs or complex networking, try Tom's Root/Boot:
http://www.toms.net/rb/
--1.44 floppy becomes a 1.7(?) with special format, boots, dumps everything to Ramdisk so you can use the floppy drive. There's also a 2.88MB El Torito boot image. :)
--IMHO, IBM did a Good Thing(TM) when they standardized on the 1.44M starting with the PS/2 MCA series; remember, all we had before those were basically 360k, el cheapo 720, and half-assed 5 1/4" 1.2M drives.
--The "era" of the floppy drive is long past, but you still can't beat it for built-in (BIOS) *writable* support. If you could make a Zip-100 drive act as /dev/fd0 ( A:\ ) in the BIOS (or an LS-120 hybrid even) it would be a good leap fwd; but for most common, everyday stuff it would be overkill.
--Of course I'm still waiting for packet-writing CD burners to be BIOS-supported; then we can use those 3.5" CDRW's as floppies. :shock:
Quote:
Originally Posted by SUOrangeman
I do like the idea of having a very small partition to serve as a "bootable floppy." However, making use of 'dd' sorta assumes that some competent *NIX is up and running.
And, yes, I am trying to force the issue of moving beyond the era of the floppy drive. Heck, we've got single hard drives inching towards 250 and 320GB. Bootable CDs would definitely suffice, by Tyan seems to be having a little trouble with El Torito and friends. :?
-SUO
Now you'll get me on a rant of why I hate Iomega. They agressively sold the inferior zip drive and not many people bought the ls-120 drive which was the "future" in my opinion. Now you can hardly get ls-120/ls-240 drives anywhere. And certainly not as a standard item in a PC.
If it were up to me, all computers would come with a LS-240 drive as standard. It is certainly enough to load a mini-knoppix on to and certainly the "floppy replacement" Now I see Zip-750 drives out... We need a good floppy replacement and CD-RW doesn't fit the bill. (Can't boot a cd-rw and also write to it in the same session)
Old Laptop and Knoppix and loadlin
I was trying to find a loadlin for knoppix as I have a laptop that has no floppy and bios does not boot from CD-rom. Other than that this machine is ripe for knoppix.
There very little chance of getting a working floppy drive for this machine without splashing a some cash. It has no USB ports so that's out.
I found the original loadlin (circa 96) from Hans Lermans site, but it didn't work, no real surprize. I guess things have got a bit bigger since 96.
I don't want to run it from Win 9x, just straight from dos!
It would be really use to have some other way to boot Knoppix, without floppy or cdrom
:)
Re: Is there a "loadlin" for knoppix?
As I understand you do not have a floppy drive.
If your HDD is large enough you can copy the KNOPPIX file (700 MB) from the cd-rom /KNOPPIX directory to a directory with the same name on the HDD. Next you will need a program like WinImage for Windows to open one of the boot diskette images that are on the CD and extract to your HDD KNOPPIX directory the files vmlinuz, miniroot.gz and syslinux.cfg. The last one id just for refference for the command line options you can use. You have to find loadlin.exe and place it in the same directory. Next create a knoppix.bat file in the same place. Edit the knoppix.bat file and write a single line (just an example):
loadlin vmlinuz initrd=miniroot.gz VGA=788 lang=us
The startup script in miniroot is set to scan all drives for a KNOPPIX file and to install the one it finds. Of course this will still be a readonly system. In my version (3.1) there is no option to save prefernces to a hard disk instad of floppy. Good luck