Faster - Smaller Boot Floppy!

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, I was going to experiment and see if I could get rid of drvspace.bin, but I guess I better not!

Thanx for the info on vga=791. I thought there would be some algorithm to get from 1024x768x64k to 791 and visa versa, I guess not.

BTW, I have this DOSboot disk working on all my PCs and find the following approximate time savings:

Lab1: Pentium MMX 233Mhz with DOSboot
boot-up: 2 min 30 sec
openOO : 1 min 30

Lab1: Pentium MMX 233Mhz with KNOPPIXboot
boot-up: 3 min 30 sec
openOO : 2 min

Lab2: Pentium III 866Mhz with DOSboot
boot-up: 1 min
openOO : 1 min

Lab2: Pentium III 866Mhz with KNOPPIXboot
boot-up: 1 min 30 sec
openOO : 1 min 30 sec

So, how's that?

Regards,

[monkeyman]

The solid state machines I set up with the DOS boot take about 30 sec/30 sec. They all have P-III 1.4 Ghz processors with 512KB cache, so your numbers look right on the money.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

You mean DOSboot =30 sec and startOO = 30 sec on your PCs? Wow! What exactly is a solid state machine? Can I have one please?

Regards,

[monkeyman]

You mean DOSboot =30 sec and startOO = 30 sec on your PCs? Wow! What exactly is a solid state machine? Can I have one please?

Regards,

You will have to build one yourself. All you need is an appropriate mini-ITX or mini-ATX case and motherboard, one of these solid state hard drives: http://www.bitmicro.com/products_edisk_35_ide.php
768 MB RAM, passive cooling and a fanless power supply. No moving parts. Yeah, it is pretty darned speedy.

[baldyeti]

OK, so I tried what you said. I made a WINME Startup Disk (rescue disk) and replaced the contents of autoexec.bat with

c:
cd \knoppix
loadlin vmlinuz ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=en vga=791 initrd=miniroot.gz screen=1280x1024 BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix

which all fit on one line. I also got rid of all the sections in config.sys except [common] and voila, it booted from hda1 properly.

Glad to hear I helped. I'd still advise using the loadlin parameter file,
keeping as many of the original syslinux.cfg parameters as posiible
without them being silently swallowed by the (DOS) command line interpreter.

The only thing I don't like is all the rescue files on the disk. Which of these files can I get rid of?
Also, it says WINME Startup Disk on the screen when it boots - can I get rid of that?

Yes you can: I just came across a freedos boot disk, apparently prepared for
installing slackware (a linux distro), with fat32 support and loadlin.exe included:
http://www.userlocal.com/dosslack/
Just delete/rename config.sys + autoexec.bat and replace them with a
plain loadlin invocation, and you'll be using nothing but GPL'd software!

Btw, which rescue files are you talking about?

[garyng]

Yes you can: I just came across a freedos boot disk, apparently prepared for
installing slackware (a linux distro), with fat32 support and loadlin.exe included:
http://www.userlocal.com/dosslack/
Just delete/rename config.sys + autoexec.bat and replace them with a
plain loadlin invocation, and you'll be using nothing but GPL'd software!

That is great. There is no SCSI support but it shouldn't be a problem for most desktops and for those machine using SCSI, they are less likely to be the target for KNOPPIX(only power user opts for SCSI and they would know where to get debian, Redhat etc.)

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Oh, never mind about the rescue files. I just created a DOSboot disk in WIN98 and I don't get all those files anymore!

These are the files I use:

/mnt/floppy/autoexec.bat
/mnt/floppy/command.com
/mnt/floppy/msdos.sys
/mnt/floppy/io.sys
/mnt/floppy/drvspace.bin

and

/mnt/hda1/knpppix/loadlin.exe
/mnt/hda1/knoppix/vmlinuz
/mnt/hda1/knoppix/miniroot.gz
/mnt/hda1/knoppix/knoppix

BTW, one added benefit of all this is that my kids only need one disk now.

You don't know what a nightmare its been! I was runing bigslack on a DOS partition until most of the hdds in my lab started to fail. So I ran to knoppix and made 3 disks for each student (one boot floppy, one data floppy and one CD). I saw this as the only way to help my students right away on an emergency basis. I can't even knx-hdsinstall (as the hdds are failing and too small).

I used to have to bring into each lab 25 CDs, 25 KNOPPIXboot disks and 25 data disks for my students to save their work per class (3 such classes). With the KNOPPIX image on hda1, I don't need the CDs anymore. Now that I've switched to the DOSboot disks, not only does KNOPPIX boot faster and run smoother, but there's plenty of room left on the DOSboot disk to save files too, so no more data disks! Well, the boot disk doubles as the data disk.... So, I need a DOSboot disk for each of my students and that's all. That's still 75 "data/boot disks," but no more KNOPPIXboot disks or CDs.

TADA all over again!

Next year, I'm supposed to get my lab replaced. We'll see about knx-hdinstall then for at least one server to save their work and to ftp files from me. I like this DOSboot disk set-up, though. I may keep this kind of set-up with the latest copy of KNOPPIX on my new Pentium IVs. They should fly! I had an intranet running with slackware (for the last 5 years or so) and we had it all set-up nice with file servers, ftp servers, print servers.... I even had to move my ftp server files to http://www.geocities.com/calcpage2000/pub just to share files again!

Thanx,

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Somewhere along the line I stated that one disadvantage of running the huge compressed KNOPPIX image file from hda1 is that you can't mount hda1. That's not correct. You can mount it, but you can't make it rw.

Regards,

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Don't miss HOWTO: Upgrade the Poor Man's Dual Boot
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=12040

I strongly recommend using the faster DOSbootdisk with the Poor Man's Dual Boot. I have reinstalled all my PCs (100 on a LAN, 5 others off the LAN but on cable modems) this way, works great!

Enjoy!

[Dave_Bechtel]

--Actually you can:

' mount /cdrom -oremount,rw '

--I've done it a bunch of times. It's a good idea to remount RO though when you're done writing to it tho.

Somewhere along the line I stated that one disadvantage of running the huge compressed KNOPPIX image file from hda1 is that you can't mount hda1. That's not correct. You can mount it, but you can't make it rw.

Regards,