Originally Posted by
ted142
Hello,
Not totally new to Linux flavors, and toyed with a few variants of Knoppix, but...
I like the "safety" of a live CD but the speed of HD access. The new unionfs is great. Is it possible to copy an image of the Live CD into a read-only partition and tell any boot loader to look for the CD image there? I'm thinking of two partitions-one for the safe files, one for the usual saved configuratiion and programs I'm "testing" but don't want them to affect my "happy with it" version. Does this make sense?
And I know USB is faster, but I dont want a dongle dangling where it can get damaged. Maybe just mounting an iso image is possible, but I'd like the guarantee that any old crap that I happen to be messing things up with invariably has ZERO access to my "happy with it " image/partition/CD.
Hope it makes sense and I'm not missing something obvious...
thanks
Certainly
notes/disclaimer; I have done this on a HDD that was FAT32 formatted and ext2 and ext3 only -- NTFS may have some other issues -- for NTFS see
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Win_Partition and look around these forums nad the Wiki
http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/
Anyway;
using ext2 or ext3 isa "much" better solution to using FAT32, since FAT32 does NOT have the ability to store "ownership/permissions" of Users (Metadata) -- this is extremely necessary to have a "properly" working persistent /home directory.
There's a bit of a catch22 to this -- you can boot from LiveCD and use QTParted - or use cfdisk to create, move, resize partitions...I used Qtparted and made myself (2 partitions) - an ext3 partition of ~8GB. Later, after booting to it, I made a Persistent Home Dir. (PHD) on that ext3 partition of about 1GB ...I also made a separate /swap partition of 1.5GB (I only made it that big, b/c of small amt of RAM, and if wanting to burn CDs or DVDs, thought I may need that much space...usually 512-1024 is more than adequate for /swap).
Boot from LiveCD and enter the cheatcode;
Code:
knoppix tohd=/dev/hdaX
Typical IDE interface has 2 Channels (each with 2 Devices capable) for a total of 4 devices - hence --> hda, hdb, hdc, hdd <--hda is 1st HDD, hdb the 2nd HDD, etc
'X' is a numbered partition of each HDD -- hda1 is 1st partition on 1st HDD (then 5,6,7,8 are the Logicals, "if" an Extended partition exists with Logical Drives.
If not each HDD can have up to 4 Primary [or 3 Primary + 1 Extended partition] -- this is where hda2, hda3, hda4 disappear to -- remember the ' a ' in hd
a refers to the 1st HDD, or "Primary Master" -- hd
b would be the Primary Slave HDD, and hd
c would be the Secondary Master (Many times this is an Optical Disk Drive (ODD) --> a CD/DVD Drive).
Ok - so the
tohd= cheatcode copies the KNOPPIX image to the Hard Disk and runs from HDD image (see knoppix-cheatcodes.txt in \KNOPPIX Directory on CD/DVD media), so Next time, you can boot using this cheatcode;
Code:
knoppix fromhd=/dev/hd?X
remember;
* the "?" is going to be a letter (a,b,c,d) of the HDD (which one of 4 possible)
* the "X" is going to be the partition number (1,5,6,7,8,etc usually) - or (2,3,4 which is rarer, but it's what I'm using at the moment)
you can also enter a "Saved Knoppix Config" cheatcode along with the fromhd= cheatcode;
Code:
## example only
knoppix26 fromhd=/dev/hda1 home=/dev/hda1 myconf=/dev/hdb5
*edit (added 'home=/dev/hda1' line to cheatcode) */edit