New Knoppix boot option: toram

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09-09-2003, 01:28 AM
aay

New Knoppix boot option: toram

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
09-09-2003, 07:16 AM
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
09-09-2003, 12:05 PM
kbreen

image writable?

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.
09-09-2003, 03:17 PM
aay

Quote:

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.
09-09-2003, 03:18 PM
aay

Re: image writable?

Quote:

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.
09-09-2003, 08:30 PM
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,
09-09-2003, 08:49 PM
aay

Quote:

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.
09-13-2003, 08:26 PM
kbreen

Would be nice if damnsmalllinux.org could get a toram cheat. As it's only 50MB, it would easily fit.
09-16-2003, 10:41 PM
Fabianx

Quote:

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:

Quote:

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
09-21-2003, 12:28 PM
bitey

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!
09-22-2003, 10:17 AM
Dave_Bechtel

Re: New Knoppix boot option: toram

--Note: The options syntax has changed for 9-22 release:

* V3.3-2003-09-22
- added AX25 protocol support on request
- Boot option tohd=hda1 changed to tohd=/dev/hda1 for consistence
- New and improved inofficial installer "knoppix-installer" from Fabian Franz
- Service menu for Samba export
- re-added xchat
- ddcxinfo-knoppix now uses extended monitor modelines from Kano by default
- fixed knoppix-terminalserver (Kernel 2.4.22 module dependencies)

Quote:

Originally Posted by aay

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
10-02-2003, 04:07 AM
cookiepuss

I would like to get those files to add to Local Area Security. It is only 180MB and this functionality would be great for forensics in terms of being able to burn to CDs with L.A.S. in RAM. I would like to add this to the 0.4 MAIN release. . .

-J-
jascha@
http://localareasecurity.com
10-02-2003, 11:29 AM
Dave_Bechtel

--The instructions handling this are in the boot.img file on the CD:
boot.img < miniroot.gz < linuxrc

--To get at that linuxrc file:
o Grab Knoppix CD, boot into runlevel 2

' mkdir /mnt/tmp '

( If you're already in Linux and want to operate on the ISO file:
-- mount KNOPPIX*.iso /mnt/tmp -oro,loop
-- cp /mnt/tmp/KNOPPIX/boot.img .
-- umount /mnt/tmp
)

o If running from CD: ' cp /cdrom/KNOPPIX/boot.img /ramdisk ; cd /ramdisk ' -- You can also mount a writeable HD partition and do this work there, obviously

o mount boot.img /mnt/tmp -oro,loop
o zcat /mnt/tmp/miniroot.gz >miniroot ; umount /mnt/tmp

o mount miniroot /mnt/tmp -oloop

--Now you can access the linuxrc file in /mnt/tmp, miniroot is an ext2 filesystem. Search for the cheatcodes. It gets rather complex from there. ;-)

--Side note, for anyone interested: Outside the boot.img miniroot, Other cheatcodes are handled on CD boot by /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig ( < /etc/rcS.d entry < /etc/inittab.) On an HD install the /etc/rcS.d is markedly different.

Quote:

Originally Posted by cookiepuss

I would like to get those files to add to Local Area Security. It is only 180MB and this functionality would be great for forensics in terms of being able to burn to CDs with L.A.S. in RAM. I would like to add this to the 0.4 MAIN release. . .

-J-
jascha@
http://localareasecurity.com
10-07-2003, 06:43 PM
dmedici

Hi all!

I have a couple of newbie questions re: this topic...

1) Why is it so dangerous mixing Knoppix with a NTFS drive? I mean, what is it that happens to toast the drive? I just wanted to understand this a bit more.

2) Am I reading this right in that using the TORAM command you can easily install Knoppix to a hard drive? For example, I have two HDs in my machine. One has W2K and the other is totally blank. Could I install Knoppix onto this blank HD through this command, or is the procedure a bit more complex?

Thanks for your help and patience with my newbie questions.
10-07-2003, 06:56 PM
j.drake

1. My understanding is that Linux does not fully support writing to NTFS, so the risk is that whatever you write to the NTFS disk may not be readable in either Linux or Windows. Worse yet, I'd be concerned about corrupting the whole drive contents, but I don't know if that's valid. BTW, I understand that the new release of SUSE, due out later this month, is supposed to address many of the NTFS compatibility concerns, but I don't know the specifics. See the link below, where they claim: "SUSE LINUX 9.0 now also supports the NTFS file system used by Microsoft Windows 2000 and XP. Thus, users of all Windows versions without any previous Linux experience can install SUSE LINUX alongside Windows and migrate gradually. "

http://www.suse.com/us/private/produ...interview.html

2. The purpose of TORAM is to run Knoppix from RAM. There is a knoppix installer for installing Knoppix to HD. There are a number of posts and threads relating to installing Linux to a second HD and keeping Windows on the first. Word search the forum, and look particularly in the HD Install section.
10-07-2003, 08:22 PM
j.drake

OK, Paradox posted the link to this thread, so here is an example of installing Linux to a second HD (note that I had some minor problems also :oops: )

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...er=asc&start=0

and then there's this one:

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...711&highlight=
11-17-2003, 08:35 AM
jbreiden

Is it my imagination, or did 'toram' stop working in the 2003-11-14 release?
03-27-2006, 02:45 AM
suchangyu

Quote:

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,

what's the ramdisk size on your Dell GX270?
If that is smaller than 1gig, was your "toram" operation truely successful?
what's the smallest size in order to run "toram"?
11-02-2006, 02:18 AM
jwilhelm

Booting tohd

Hello,
I am not sure if this helps, but using a company laptop with winxp pro as only OS (naturally HD is NFST), I used UltraIso to copy the ISO image to c:\knoppix.iso and when I want to boot from HD , I log in as Knoppix and add bootfrom=/dev/hda1/knoppix.iso and it works perfectly. If this helps, voila. It certainly works for me in liberating the CD drive and when using my usbflash drive formatted with swap, and home files, it saves wear and tear there!

JWilhelm