johnrw wrote:
When I looked into the menu.lst on sda1... so I could add the "home=scan"...
I found a parameter I don't understand: "data=ramdisk"
Hi John,
Sorry for the delay in my response, I did not notice your question until now... Good catch !
I have to admit that you are the first one to have noticed this and I am glad that you asked what it is used for.
The "data=ramdisk" linux kernel parameter is to setup the "after boot" data persistence into a separate ramdisk "/mnt/data"
which is different from the original ramdisk "/ramdisk" which now only contains the modified data from the boot process,
mainly resulting from the hardware auto-detection. The goal of this way to handle the data persistence is double:
First it allows to use a disk partition as a whole (instead of a file within a shared partition) allowing for much faster access
and bandwidth by using something like "data=sdb1". Just be aware that the data in that "sdb1" partition will be overwritten.
Then this is also an attempt to only have the persistence of the data that matters and keep the hardware specific data
out of it allowing for an easy migration of a customized setup (with valuable data persistence but not boot persistence)
to another hardware without loosing the great Knoppix hardware auto detection benefits. This is especially handy when
you have this setup on a USB dongle that you use to run on multiple and different hardware.
I hope that my explanations are clear enough for you to understand...
Best Regards,
Gilles