Booting or installing from a PCMCIA CD-ROM or USB CD-ROM?

[znmeb]

Here's the deal ... I have a Toshiba 2595CDT laptop with a broken internal CD-ROM drive. I have a USB CD-RW and a PCMCIA CD drive. I've managed to install Woody from a mix of floppies and the PCMCIA CD drive, but I'd like to install Knoppix. Is there some kind of boot floppy I can make to boot Knoppix from one of the two off-board CD readers, or, better yet, to install Knoppix directly onto the hard drive. If it helps, I have other computers, a 6 GB PCMCIA hard drive and a 20 GB USB hard drive as well.

[AngelGabriel]

Can you set the bios to boot from network? If you can, then set up another machine with knoppix, run the knoppix-terminal server, connect the two via ethernet and there ya go.

[znmeb]

I don't think the BIOS has that option. I tried the Knoppix boot floppy and that didn't work.

Could I repartition the hard drive, load the base Woody on one partition, then unpack Knoppix to another partition and boot it that way? Then I'd have a dual-boot system, which is fine.

[brentmid]

I have a dual boot NT / Knoppix on a Toshiba laptop that has no CD drive and no floppy. I have an external PCMCIA CD drive, but to my knowledge, there is no way to boot knoppix off it, because it hangs very early in the process.

Here's how I got it working

2 partitions:
First is NTFS w/ WinXP
Second is FAT w/ Knoppix

MBR has the NTLDR bootloader.

I put w32grub in a separate directory on the NTFS drive. I set up boot.ini so NTLDR gives me the option of booting to WinXP or going to GRUB.

If I select GRUB, I have it pointing to the knoppix install on the FAT partition. To get this to work, I had to go to a second machine, make a boot floppy, and then copy the boot floppy files (vmlinuz and miniroot.gz) to the FAT partition via a network connection. GRUB uses those files to boot knoppix.

So now I can boot whatever I want without a floopy or CD.

w32grub is available at: http://www.skyjammer.com/files/knoppix/

[znmeb]

I'm getting close. I started by following the first steps of the remastering article on the O' Reilly web site. I'm not interested in dual-booting NT, but dual-booting Woody is acceptable. So I divided up the hard drive into a swap partition, a 700 MB partition for the CD image, a 150 MB partition for a base bootable Woody and the rest (about 4.5 GB) /home ext2 space. Then I installed Woody to the 150 MB partition and used it to copy the CD onto the 700 MB partition. I managed to get everything to work until I got to the LILO step. It's probably recoverable, unless the reboot didn't sync the hard drive properly on the way down, but it refused to come back up. I'm not sure what I did wrong -- I had to abandon it until tonight. Once I get the LILO part working, I'm pretty sure this will be one way to go.

Question: assuming that I have the Woody partition working, is there something like "loadlin" for Linux that will just boot off the PCMCIA CD or my PCMCIA hard drive? All the compressed loopback driver magic appears to have worked flawlessly for the copy -- couldn't it be used to boot into KNOPPIX??

[garyng]

I have a dual boot NT / Knoppix on a Toshiba laptop that has no CD drive and no floppy. I have an external PCMCIA CD drive, but to my knowledge, there is no way to boot knoppix off it, because it hangs very early in the process.

Here's how I got it working

2 partitions:
First is NTFS w/ WinXP
Second is FAT w/ Knoppix

MBR has the NTLDR bootloader.

I put w32grub in a separate directory on the NTFS drive. I set up boot.ini so NTLDR gives me the option of booting to WinXP or going to GRUB.

If I select GRUB, I have it pointing to the knoppix install on the FAT partition. To get this to work, I had to go to a second machine, make a boot floppy, and then copy the boot floppy files (vmlinuz and miniroot.gz) to the FAT partition via a network connection. GRUB uses those files to boot knoppix.

So now I can boot whatever I want without a floopy or CD.

w32grub is available at: http://www.skyjammer.com/files/knoppix/

good to hear that w32grub works for you. A litte trick that you may employ in the future(say KNOPPIX being updated).

There is a memdisk thing(I forgot if I put it in w32grub, if not you can get it from where you get syslinux, try google it) which allows you to boot floppy image from within GRUB, that is very nice for notebook users without CD/floppy. It works like the following(in GRUB) example

title "KNOPPIX 2003-11-04"
kernel /boot/memdisk
initrd /boot/knoppix_boot.img

so all you need is to copy the 1.44M boot image from the KNOPPIX CD if you have a CD-ROM(even not bootable). If you don't or don't want to burn one, there are shareware floating around that allows you to peek into ISO9660 image and extract files from it. There is even a nice little utility which is called knoppix-customize(that can extract files, no GUI) which you can search on this forum.

So with w32grub, memdisk and knoppix-customize, one can inject KNOPPIX(and later other flavor of linux once there is a version of linux) into a Windows XP/NTFS jailed machine with no floppy/cd-rom or any machine which is has boot option restricted to HD only, so long there is a network connection and one can modify boot.ini.

[garyng]

I'm getting close. I started by following the first steps of the remastering article on the O' Reilly web site. I'm not interested in dual-booting NT, but dual-booting Woody is acceptable. So I divided up the hard drive into a swap partition, a 700 MB partition for the CD image, a 150 MB partition for a base bootable Woody and the rest (about 4.5 GB) /home ext2 space. Then I installed Woody to the 150 MB partition and used it to copy the CD onto the 700 MB partition. I managed to get everything to work until I got to the LILO step. It's probably recoverable, unless the reboot didn't sync the hard drive properly on the way down, but it refused to come back up. I'm not sure what I did wrong -- I had to abandon it until tonight. Once I get the LILO part working, I'm pretty sure this will be one way to go.

Question: assuming that I have the Woody partition working, is there something like "loadlin" for Linux that will just boot off the PCMCIA CD or my PCMCIA hard drive? All the compressed loopback driver magic appears to have worked flawlessly for the copy -- couldn't it be used to boot into KNOPPIX??

You don't really need 'loadin' for Linux so long you have at least one version of linux running on that machine. You can safely install either lilo or GRUB(that I prefer) which can boot almost any flavor of linux on CD-ROM, HD, through loopback driver, through cloop, on USB storage, from network. The key is, get a good boot loader on the machine and I would say GRUB meets this and is very flexible. LILO works equally well, the only issue is any change needs to rerun it which I don't like.

[JechiD]

I have a dual boot NT / Knoppix on a Toshiba laptop that has no CD drive and no floppy. I have an external PCMCIA CD drive, but to my knowledge, there is no way to boot knoppix off it, because it hangs very early in the process.

Here's how I got it working

2 partitions:
First is NTFS w/ WinXP
Second is FAT w/ Knoppix

MBR has the NTLDR bootloader.

I put w32grub in a separate directory on the NTFS drive. I set up boot.ini so NTLDR gives me the option of booting to WinXP or going to GRUB.

If I select GRUB, I have it pointing to the knoppix install on the FAT partition. To get this to work, I had to go to a second machine, make a boot floppy, and then copy the boot floppy files (vmlinuz and miniroot.gz) to the FAT partition via a network connection. GRUB uses those files to boot knoppix.

So now I can boot whatever I want without a floopy or CD.

w32grub is available at: http://www.skyjammer.com/files/knoppix/

Hello,

I have tried the above but iam not sure how to point grub to the image that i have copied from the boot floppy.

could you perhaps give precise instructions towards that.

thank you

Daniel

[brentmid]

So I am assuming at this point that you have all the files from the Knoppix CD on a partition.

Then you would make a bootfloppy ( I had to do this on a second machine that I booted from the knoppix CD) by using dd to put boot.img onto the floppy.

At that point I booted my original machine to windows, and copied all the files from the floppy into the root of the partition where the knoppix cd files are.

The I downloaded w32grub. I followed the instructions, by extracting to a directory on my windows partition - c:\boot. I edited the c:\boot\grub\menu.lst file to look like this:

# Sample boot menu configuration file
#

# Boot automatically after a minute.
timeout 60

# By default, boot the second entry.
default 1

# Fallback to the first entry.
fallback 0

title Windows XP
unhide (hd0,0)
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1

# PenguinSleuth
title PenguinSleuth
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz lang=us nopcmcia nousb lang=us
initrd /miniroot.gz

Then I ran the w32grub.exe. This is a one-time execution. It fixes up the stage1 bootloader so grub will run correctly.

Then I rebooted and from NTLDR, I select GRUB, and then from GRUB I select PenguinSleuth and I am in business.

I hope that made some sense.

Let me know if you need more clarification.

[JechiD]

Then I ran the w32grub.exe. This is a one-time execution. It fixes up the stage1 bootloader so grub will run correctly.

Then I rebooted and from NTLDR, I select GRUB, and then from GRUB I select PenguinSleuth and I am in business.

I hope that made some sense.

Let me know if you need more clarification.

It sounds like i need to have the GRUB loader already in place, so that the harddrive is already initially booting from it. In my case i have partition magic installed and it is my boot manager. And currently i has one primary win95 parition and several logical partition. Onto D: i have placed all knoppix files and w32grub files.

I guess under these circumstances it will not work.

Dani