TRUE AND REAL TO-HD INSTALL

[chris_Xnest]

Hi there, Knoppixers

I'm a Knoppix user and, as a perfection-bent user that I am, I see an aspect that might be perfectioned.
I'm talking about the to-hd install (aka "poor man's install"). For God's sake, isn't this supposed to be resulting in an independent bootable partition ? Because as far as I know the only result is a useless non-bootable partition which can't be booted without the CD in the drive or a floppy.
See, I don't know about others, but I got used to a boot manager that can also partition the HD and can boot any partition I want out of more than 200 possible on a HDD. With this one, it's very embarassing to not be able to have an independent Knoppix partition which be bootable, without the need of the Knoppix floppies or the CD itself.
I've been thinking about this and I discovered that the to-hd can be made using syslinux, and the result is a perfect imitation of the Knoppix CD boot process, an independent bootable partition that can be directly booted.
I put up a script to do all this, with nice dialogs for selecting the partition and copying the CD to it. If anybody is interested in this script, just gimme a reply to this topic. I can send it by email to anyone, maybe somobody will even post it on a server, to be accessible for everyone.

B'bye ...

[Fabianx]

I put up a script to do all this, with nice dialogs for selecting the partition and copying the CD to it. If anybody is interested in this script, just gimme a reply to this topic. I can send it by email to anyone, maybe somobody will even post it on a server, to be accessible for everyone.

B'bye ...

Please upload it somewhere or drop me a mail to [email protected].

[OErjan]

yes indeed, please put it somewhere. PLEEES, it would be great.

[chris_Xnest]

OK, guys, so I see there's some interest in this matter. So tomorrow, the 16th of February 2005, I'll try and send this script to Fabian for testing and maybe, if it passes the tests he will post it somewhere on the server for everyone to use and enjoy it

Hopefully until tomorrow I will be able to fix some things in it, to make it as flawless as possible

[chris_Xnest]

OK guys, I've just sent the script to Fabian, to take a look at it and maybe post it somewhere. I don't have a website, so I don't see other solutions to publish it. So watch this topic for further notiifcations about the future download link.
If someone requests, I can send the script by mail to him.

[ryanpq]

I dropped you an email via the forum email tool. I'd like to get a hold of a copy of your script and try it out. You can reach me at ryan at isptec dot net

Thanks

[ryanpq]

I have provided chris_Xnest with hosting for his script. It can be downloaded at the URL below
http://www.symphonyos.com/tohd.sh.gz

[jmort]

Would there be someone out there kind enough to send me a copy of the script that is zipped instead of .gz? I am having trouble opening the .gz file.

Thanks in advance,
James

[cyberoidx]

Me toooooooooo i wanna boot like that too. My boot manager can boot off any number of partitions, but when my knoppix part is selected it just doesn't go ahead.

[monckywrench]

If the script could be modified not to put the swapfile on the hd it would be great for installing Knoppix to Compact Flash cards. 8)

[Keilaron]

Good script - too bad it only uses FAT. Thankfully, I didn't need it to install a bootloader, so I just looked at what it did to figure out how to make Knoppix the OS that booted instead of what I had before.
(Short history: installed trustix, decided it was too "young" to use, started using knoppix instead, and well, I had the right bootloader and all, but it was still trustix' boot files in /dev/hda1...)
Afterwards, I felt kinda stupid for not having figured it out before. :oops:

[chris_Xnest]

Hi there, Knoppixers

The main reason I made this script is because I wanted to have a toHD install able to boot by itself AND lok the same as the original CD BOOT PROCESS..

I used in this purpose the isolinux which is also used by the original CD.

But the main drawback is that isolinux is not able to boot from HD unless the partition is FAT16 - or at least that's what I know at the moment. (If this is not true, someone please let me know, by no means I'm a Linux guru, I have a lot more to learn)

I didn't revisited this topic for quite some time, because I didn't receive any notice about the replies on it, and after some 2 months I see there's been some people reading it.

I intend to maintain this script, and if anyone is interested in anything regarding it, or have some problem with it, they can contact me at this mail address: [email protected]

Someone earlier mentioned something about doing the toHD on a flash card and about swap partitions. Well, my script does not have anything to do with swap partitions (the toHD automatically detects the swap, as far as I know). As for the flash card, I don't think isolinux will agree to boot from it, so it's not gonna work - not with my script.

By the way, I'm currently trying to get up and running a Knoppix remaster with some electronics packages in it (compiled from sources) and some other few more goodies, and I tried to do some improvements to the system. I had to write another script, usable from konqueror's context menu, which mounts automatically an ISO image and opens its contents in another konqueror window.
If anyone is interested in this too, let me know

Good look and enjoy Knoppix. IMO, it's the best Linux ever.