Boot knoppix withough Floppy and CD boot

[Dan_Netwalker]

I would like to run knoppix from the cd on my high school computers, but the machines I'm talking about are set to boot from hdd and the bios is locked with password. I know theres lots of programs to break the bios pass but I don't want to mess with them. The machine boots to Windows 2000 or alternatively to MSDOS 7.0, and I can save anithing to D: but not more than a 100-200MB. Msdos is in C: and W2K is in E:, and both of this partitions are restored daily.

Can anyone tell me how the hell can i make the cd boot from msdos (with loadlin, I presume) withough changing anything in the other disk partitions?

I would apreciate if you put a link to a howto or something like that.

By the way, great work! I already tested the CD on three PCs and it worked right away withought changing anything (except the screen and wheelmouse cheatcodes )

[oscar]

...yes, loadlin do the job

Copy miniroot.gz and vmlinux into c:\ (they are in boot.img or boot-en.img ). Extract with winimage or copy from floppy created with mkfloppy.bat

then

c:\loadlin.exe c:\vmlinuz rw lang=en floppyconfig root=/dev/hdd initrd=c:\miniroot.gz screen=800x600

lang=en floppyconfig screen=800x600 are only for ex. of cheatcodes

[Dan_Netwalker]

Thanks, it worked fine.

By the way, someone knows if I can change root=/dev/hdd for /dev/sda1 so I can pick the root from a solid disk drive? Do I need something exoteric apart from this? The boot is on linux, linux may look for the file in any mountable drive, so if I prepare a kernel with usb support so it can look for files on the solid disc, it will be able to mount it from there...

...right??

(This way I may use mi 1GB pen drive to bring the files and save /home. No more CDs, no more stupid people telling me not to install games, no more teachers trying to know WTF I'm doing on the PC, no more scared looking BOFH say "What the hell have you done to windows???", and so long... Yes, all this happend to me, in just 3 hours! )

[A. Jorge Garcia]

I feel your pain man! We're with you.

I've had all the same cracks at my school.

Eventually they learn to leave you alone because you're "that Linux guy!"

Regards,

[Dan_Netwalker]

JAJAJA! Yeah, thats right, but in the process they don't stop pestering you, and is quite stressing when you get interrupted for the sevent time in half an hour by someone saying "what the hell is that?"

...I don't mind if they are women, but they usually aren't so it's very borring to explay again and again "it's a linux distro blah blah...".

And I don't know where are you from, but here in Spain Linux is not really really popular amongst the university stuff, especially the guys in charge of the computer labs or the library computers. They see something strange spitting letters to the screen and instead of saying "a knoppix booting..." they usually say "VIRUS!" followed by a "may you go to another computer, please?. I have to turn down this one...". Really, I'm seriuos! :P

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Well, my sig was recently shortened by eadz , our commander and chief seeing as this is his forum...

Anyway, it used to say something like:
___________________________________________
A. Jorge Garcia

Teacher and Professor
Applied Math and Comp Sci
The Calculus Archive Project Online!

Baldwin High School and Nassau Community College
Long Island, New York, USA, Sol, Milky Way
___________________________________________

So now you know where I'm from!

I've been installing Linux behind the "pin-head's" backs for over 5 years now. If its not M$ WINDOZE or Novell, they can't fix it. So they have these God awful security programs on every PC so you can't install anything or change a single setting. Well, when my Computer Science class switched from Pascal to C++ these security programs conflicted with the WINDOZE compilers no matter what I did!

So, I installed a 150MB footprint Slackware Linux on the DOS partition making a little IntraNet and never looked back! Of course, we use KNOPPIX now. Recently, the lab with Linux installed started to fall apart, so we had to switch to a Live Bootable CD solution. KNOPPIX came to the rescue just in time!

Now that I'm in charge of the programming department, they leave me alone, but its been an up hill battle all the way!

BTW, when I recently applied to the Educator-Astronaut program, the "tech-heads" almost died when they figured out I'd have to relocate to Houston, Texas! Amazing how they need me all of a sudden. Don't worry, I revoked my application. I applied, ironically, the day before the Columbia STS-107 disaster. Now, if I go into space, my wife will kill me before take-off....

[Dan_Netwalker]

Woops! I didn't look under the name... :P Well, it's easier to test new things when you are part of the staff, which isn't my case... I'm just part of the studients in the 3rd year, and the don't usually let us mess with the machines... They just installed some stupid hardware cards that undo anithing in the HDD, except in a small 2GB partition that the 1st year studients allways get crowded by installing GTA3 or Counter Strike. I really needed to boot from the Knoppix CD, since the program to check pop3 mail acounts isn't installed (no, they didn't even install outlook, I told you the BOFH of this place is stupid, but he seems to be paranoic too!) and explorer is not what I need to download a 5MB file in this network, since the connections get broken every 5 minutes, and so lon and so fort... Hell, we even have to set the resolution to something bigger that 640x480x256 every time we log on! So, when I learn about knoppix and having mandrake installed on mi pc for a year or so I said "I have to try this, it can't be worse!", and it turned to be quite better. It's a shame kdevelop can't make Visual Basic programs, then I may even forget about having W2K installed on my PC (yeah, sure, dream on Dan...)

Well, enough chat for now. If someone knows about the boot from dos having the files in a solid disc, drop me an email or post it here. It will really help me! And thanks for the help again!

[A. Jorge Garcia]

>>
It's a shame kdevelop can't make Visual Basic programs, then I may even forget about having W2K installed on my PC (yeah, sure, dream on Dan...)
<<

I know, that's the only reason I still tolerate WINDOZE in my lab at all. We still offer an intro class with QBASIC and Visual BASIC....

Does anyone know of a linux alternative to these? I can't seem to get WINE to work with VB and I haven't tried DOSEMU with QB yet.

I've heard of yabasic...?

Regards,