Boot from cd, use entire hdd

[bentring]

Basically the title says it all. I've got a laptop with a 4 gig drive that I want to use with cd boot. I tried the hard drive install, and it used a gig and a half, which is way too much for what I'm trying to do.

Basically this laptop will be used as a media player, and for transporting media and other large files from place to place. I want to keep as much free space as possible so the hard drive install isn't going to work for me.

What would be the best way to do this and have knoppix be able to use the entire hard drive as it's own to read&write? I formatted the drive and loaded knoppix up and configured the swap drive as the remainder of the disk. But this didn't seem to me like a good method to acheive what I want.

Any suggestions? And I'm relatively new to linux so you may need to "dumb down" your answer for me.

Thanks!

BR

[tearinghairout]

I think all you will need to do is - after booting from the CD - right click on the hard drive icon on the desktop and select "Change Read/Write Mode" so that the hard drive will be mounted as read/write instead of read only.

I am assuming of course that you have already partitioned and formatted your hard disk to suit your needs.

Knoppix does by default mount drives as read-only when you click on the icon on the desktop, but you can simply override this by doing what I said in the first paragraph.

The need for a swap partition is dependant on how much RAM you have. I am guessing that a laptop with only a 4G drive will not have much RAM, so you will probably need to create a swap partition, but this should only be a couple of hundred Megs or so.

BTW. Hats off to you for coming up with the most efficient way of putting an old laptop to good use. Most people would simply install whatever OS came with it by default and make do with whatever crumbs of space were left over.

[tweetyhack]

I had a 1gig hdd and I couldn't fit all the data. I had to go in and remove stuff. Use 'dpkg --purge <package>' to remove unncessary packages.

You can also try other media-centric distributions instead of Knoppix. Movix, MythTV, etc. These are pure Linux-based media machines so very small. ~50mb download.

[j.drake]

Look at my first post here http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=11856 and read up to the point where I ask for help booting from USB. I think it will be a good fix for you, and you can set up a persistent home as big as you want it to be.