New Knoppix boot option: toram

**aay** · 09-09-2003, 01:28 AM

I just thought I'd mention to people thatyou can now boot knoppix with the "toram" option. This was enabled on the 9-5 release. What the toram option does is copy all of knoppix (700mb) to ram and run it from there. Needless to say you need a lot of ram to pull this off. I tried it last night with 1gig of ram and it worked quite nicely. The main advantage of using toram that I can see is that it lets you remove your Knoppix cd after booting up. You can then read data cd's or burn cd's from Knoppix if you are so inclined.

If you don't have this much ram there is also another new boot option: tohd. Instead of copying Knoppix to ram, tohd copies the image to your hard drive. The syntax of tohd is something like this: tohd=hda1 - at least that's what I gleaned from looking at the 9-5 changelog.

So people, try out these options and post your experiences, negative or positive, back here.

____________________________________
EDIT

Do not try the tohd option if you are using the ntfs file system!!!!!!!!!!

You may well bork your hd.

If you need to run Knoppix from the hd on an ntfs partition, copy the image from windows to the drive. You can follow the instructions for the poor mans install on the docs page.

Adam

**mikekgr** · 09-09-2003, 07:16 AM

Dear Aay,
If somebody choose to use tohd option then shall he need ~700 MB or free disk space ??? I am concerning to test this option but I am not very sure...

Best Regards
Mike Kranidis

**kbreen** · 09-09-2003, 12:05 PM

When the CD image is loaded into RAM, is the installed image then writeable at all? Can you do apt-get updates?

Any info appreciated.

**aay** · 09-09-2003, 03:17 PM

Originally Posted by mikekgr

Dear Aay,
If somebody choose to use tohd option then shall he need ~700 MB or free disk space ??? I am concerning to test this option but I am not very sure...

Best Regards
Mike Kranidis

Since all tohd does is copy the image to your hard drive, yes you should need about 700 free mb. I wish there was more documentation about tohd and toram. All I'm going on is what's in the changelog. Perhaps there is more information to be had on the developers mailing list.

**aay** · 09-09-2003, 03:18 PM

Originally Posted by kbreen

When the CD image is loaded into RAM, is the installed image then writeable at all? Can you do apt-get updates?

Any info appreciated.

I doubt it. It's still uncompressed. If somone could figure out a way to do this it would be cool though.

**A. Jorge Garcia** · 09-09-2003, 08:30 PM

It takes my "Poor Man's Dual Boot" 90 seconds to boot with "DOSBootFloppy" on my new Dell Optiplex GX270.

When I try to boot straight off the CD with the "toram" boot string, it takes 270 seconds! Also, I get no partitions on the desktop, and nothing runs any faster than normal.

Now this may well be because I have barely enough ram to run "toram" (778MB), but I thought it would run better than that! The only benefit I see to using "toram" is to free-up the cd drive.

Regards,

**aay** · 09-09-2003, 08:49 PM

Originally Posted by A. Jorge Garcia

It takes my "Poor Man's Dual Boot" 90 seconds to boot with "DOSBootFloppy" on my new Dell Optiplex GX270.

When I try to boot straight off the CD with the "toram" boot string, it takes 270 seconds! Also, I get no partitions on the desktop, and nothing runs any faster than normal.

Now this may well be because I have barely enough ram to run "toram" (778MB), but I thought it would run better than that! The only benefit I see to using "toram" is to free-up the cd drive.

Regards,

Well it's obviously going to take longer to boot since the image has to be copied to a ramdisk. I used toram with 1gig of ram and once the image was copied Knoppix ran slightly faster than normal. I noticed that swap was being used so I booted again with a noswap option. Things stayed about the same in terms of speed.

I tried out the tohd option today and it worked pretty well. It would not copy the cd to a linux partition I had, but it copied it fine to a windows partition. The tohd option also gives you the option to free up the cd. Speed from the hd is pretty good. Not that different than from toram or hd (at least on my machine). The tohd option essentially does a poormans install onto your hard drive. Technically you should be able to continually boot from it using either a boot floppy or a modified lilo.

I didn't put this in a previous post but PLEASE do not use tohd on a windows partition if you are using ntfs. You do this at your own peril. No one on knoppix.net will take responsibility if anyone's machine/hd is hosed.

I noticed another post of yours somewhere saying that the new cd is slower, but I haven't noticed that at all. It's running just as fast if not faster than previous releases on boxes that I have tested it on.

**kbreen** · 09-13-2003, 08:26 PM

Would be nice if damnsmalllinux.org could get a toram cheat. As it's only 50MB, it would easily fit.

**Fabianx** · 09-16-2003, 10:41 PM

Originally Posted by kbreen

Would be nice if damnsmalllinux.org could get a toram cheat. As it's only 50MB, it would easily fit.

Very cool idea!

I just sent the stuff to john and today he replied and said:

Originally Posted by john

[...]
I have to say, everything is amazingly fast running in ram. Now that it's possible to run DSL with a free HD I suppose I'll have to add a CD player.

Wow, this is really nice!

Thank you,
John Andrews

I'm happy, happy, happy!

cu

Fabian

**bitey** · 09-21-2003, 12:28 PM

I think tohd is great, but fromhd is even better. After you've booted the first time using:

knoppix tohd=hda1

you can skip the lengthy copy process on subsequent boots by using:

knoppix fromhd=hda1

Knoppix comes up quickly with this cheatcode (I was fairly startled the first time I tried it). I think the fast boot time may give this configuration the edge over toram.

I'm still using the Knoppix CD to start the computer, but I can eject it as soon as the hard disk takes over. Now I only need one CD-ROM drive!