Poor Man's Install

Hello Guys

I went to this page ...knoppix.net/wiki/Win_Partition. It really facinated me as i could now free my CD ROM .

But my problem is that i can't seem to clearly understand what all to do to make it work. I have the following ( lots of , please do not mind ) questions:


1. I have a 40 GB hdd. My C: is ntfs xp 16.65 GB. Rest of hdd 20.65 GB is yet unpartitioned. Now to do a Win Partition Poor Man's Installl, how am i supposed to partition the rest? My minimum requirement is to form a D: fat32 of size around 15 GB to store my data.

Should i first form an extended window partition on all the available free space and then form D: & other partitions required for Linux? or linux needed partitions will be out of the extended partitions containing D: drive?

Now how do i partition for Linux, when i only want to use Live Cd { KNOPPIX_V5.0.1CD-2006-06-01-EN } & have no plans to full install linux on my present hdd? Will i have to form root, boot, & Swap in this case too? What should be their respective sizes, given i can just allocate 5.65 GB for them? How will i format these new parititons, as fat 32, vfat, ext2 , ext3 ?


2. For this particular installation method, what are the the things i need to put on the hdd? Should both the "Knoppix.iso" & " Persistent Knoppix Disk image" be put ? Where should each go? What else i need to put on the hard drive?


3. I also download some zip files, named grube.zip, grubh.zip, kno500.zip, kno402.zip, kno401.zip, kno40.zip, Knoppix382.zip. The first 2 zips have Root_Of_USB & Root_Of_NTFS folders, but only 1st one has GRUB.BIN & makeflo folders.

Which of the following am i supposed to use, as most of them seem to be for older versions of Knoppix & the name of the knoppix versions and knoppix iso are also not of newer versions in their boot.ini or menulist files.

Moreover after identifying which ones to use and how to edit them if needed, where should they be put?



Please reply , as only then i can go ahead.

Thanks.

May I suggest a simpler way to achieve what you need.

From your description , I assume your needs are as follows:
1) you want CD-rom free but you don't mind using the cd-rom to boot up
2) you want a 15GB fat32 partition to share data between XP and Knoppix.
3) you probably want a persistent home directory to store knoppix settings and stuff

In this case, you should try the Basic Poor Man's method here: http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Basic_Poor_Mans
This is much easier to do than the Win partition poor man's install which you read about. The only drawback is that you need to use the cd-rom and the knoppix live-cd to start the boot process, but you can remove it after booting up.

Let me also suggest an even simpler method which uses the "bootfrom=" cheatcode. It involves setting up 1 partition and 1 copy operation. This is a poorer than poor man's (beggarman's installation).

1) create a new partition of type fat32 (let's call it hda2 - but obviously you should substitute it for whatever it really is called on your system). Size about 3-5 GB.
2) copy the knoppix iso image here. The name is probably KNOPPIX_V5.0.1CD-2006-06-01-EN.iso. Rename it to something simpler like anksingh.iso

That's it. Now to boot

3) insert your knoppix live-cd into the cd-rom and power on or reset
4) at the boot prompt, type the cheat code knoppix bootfrom=/dev/hda2/anksingh.iso (now you see why you should assign a simple name)
5) once knoppix has started up, you can remove the live-cd. The cd-rom is now free to use. Knoppix has probably sees it as /dev/hdb in your case.
6) create a persistent home directory. Select /dev/hda2 as your location. Select a size - how big it can be depends on how big your hda2 partition is.

Next time you boot, use the live-cd and do steps 3) and 4). To save on typing, knoppix will automatically scan for persistant home images, adn will tell you it has detected one at /dev/hda2. Do you want to use it? Say yes. That's it.

Later, in windows, you will see that hda2 (which XP has probably called D:) has 2 files: anksingh.iso and knoppix.img. One is the system image, the other the persistent home image.

As the author of the Basic Poor Man's and the Beggar Man's whiuch I described are actually quite powerful. Besides saving your normal work to a persistent home image, cause of unionfs you can also change system settings, or use apt-get to install new programs and so on. These new settings/programs will persist and be available in future sessions. There are really few constraints, except one:

Because hda2 has been taken over by knoppix for it's system area, it is difficult to create/write files to hda2 to be shared with XP. Let's say you download a media file in knoppix and want to save it to use later in XP. Or you have an XP media file to read from in knoppix. The simplest way to do this is to create a third partition:

7) hda3. You porobably have about 15GB left, so use it all as you intended. Type fat32. You can read/write to this third partition from both XP and knoppix. Use this third partition to store/share files. This is what you wanted to do anyway.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Thank You Jacky for your great suggestion & Wonderful step-by-step explanation for a layman.

I will surely use only Basic Poor Man's as this one has no hassles & perfect for Newbies like me.

Thanks again Pal. I really appreciate your help.

Hey i just did exactly what u told me. It works fine & now i can unmount my cdrom. Great.

As suggested by Jacky, i made a 5 GB FAT32 partition, put the knoppix iso over there & using cheatcode booted from the iso in the hard disk.

But before making persistent home image on the same partition, i tried to make it writable. But system tells me that i cannot write on the drive as it is already in use.

To get around this, i think that i should first boot from CD & then make PH on the free space in that partition.

But would not there then be a sharing conflict when i bootfrom iso in the same partition having PH. Will i be able to save anything in PH as the partition is not writable? Is it that i cannot write on it , but the system can ?

One related question is that suppose i make my PH of size 4.3 GB, will the data on destop folder say, config. changes in various programs, & Program additions, will automatically be saved on the PH when i shut down? or will i need to do something else to save the changes in the PH?


Waiting for your replies & Thanking you guys in advance.

My apologies, anksingh, I missed out one step.

After bootfrom hda2, before I created my PH, i did make hda2 writable. And then I created my PH on hda2. But you can't do it the normal way by right-clicking on the icon. That's why you got the error message. You have to use mount, remount etc. I will be happy to show you how to make hda2 writable to set up the PH there, but I have an even simpler suggestion below. (But if you are still interested in the above, then please ask.)

My simpler suggestion is: remember you were going to create a 15GB hda3, as a common partition to store and share files between XP and Knoppix? Create it in type fat32. Then put your persistent home directory in hda3.

Now to answer your questions:

Quote:

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To get around this, i think that i should first boot from CD & then make PH on the free space in that partition.

But would not there then be a sharing conflict when i bootfrom iso in the same partition having PH. Will i be able to save anything in PH as the partition is not writable? Is it that i cannot write on it , but the system can ?

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Interesting idea. It could work. Why don't you try it and let us know? What I do know is that I regularly load and reload different PH images which I store elsewhere and use them. And the changes persist, even though I never directly made writable the partitions where the PHs were. Having said that, why not do the simpler thing to put the PH on hda3.

Quote:

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One related question is that suppose i make my PH of size 4.3 GB, will the data on destop folder say, config. changes in various programs, & Program additions, will automatically be saved on the PH when i shut down? or will i need to do something else to save the changes in the PH?

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You don't have to do anything to save changes in your PH. Once you have set up your PH, whatever changes you make to your desktop, Home directory and anywhere else in the Knoppix filesystem will be saved by Knoppix on shutdown and will persist. As I said above, oncre created, you don't have to specially make the partition where the PH is writable or anything like that. Knoppix will do it when it needs to But remember, what you store in the PH will not be visible from XP. Say if you download a music file from the internet and store it on the knoppix desktop. With a PH, It will still be there next time you start knoppix and select the PH. But you won't see the music file from Windows XP. That's because Knoppix has stuffed it into its PH image file. To share the music file, put it into a common data partition eg your hda3.

I encourage you to experiment with Knoppix. Try different ways. The beauty of Knoppix is YOU CAN'T BREAK IT! If it doesn't work, simply reboot. And if you are afraid of wrecking your PH with some config change, just save and reload your last good PH. And if you never click on your hda1 icon (where your XP is), and never make your XP NTFS writable (please don't, yet!) you can't do anything to break your Windows XP either. And when you find out something or have some success, come and tell us. We could learn from you too.

Thanks Jacky for your help.
& i aplologise for not replying early.
I broke down the 5GB space into 2 FAT partitions, one for Iso and one for Image.
Working Fine.
Will bother u guys again whenever i face problems in future.
Bye.