Knoppix Imageing-CD

[Horsti]

Hi,

I want to remaster an Knoppix to use it for imageing
our new PCs, because I don't have DOS-Drivers
for my new NICs.

How can I make an Knoppix, that first loads from
CD and after booting from CD, I can remove it
and burn an HDD-Image of my PCs on a new cd.

I think this will make my work easier, because
i hadn't to build in an floppy drive into the pc.

Had somebody ideas, how I can build this?

Regards,
Marco

[stuart_b]

Wouldn't it be as good to simply do a normal remaster with the needed mix of applications? Because of Knoppix's hardware autodetection, I don't see any real benefit to doing it as an exercise in imaging, unless there's something that is difficult to set up in Knoppix.

Or if the default Knoppix set of apps works for you, you could even use a USB drive (since you don't want to use a floppy) to write custom settings for the Knoppix user and they would be written to the default user on install.

[Horsti]

Hi Stuart,

Wouldn't it be as good to simply do a normal remaster with the needed mix of applications? Because of Knoppix's hardware autodetection, I don't see any real benefit to doing it as an exercise in imaging, unless there's something that is difficult to set up in Knoppix.

I want to remaster an normal Knoppix, but after booting the cd must
be ejectable, because, I must burn a CD from this system.

Booting from USB, I don't know how many of our PCs are able to boot
from USB.

In my opinion it is the easiest way, to build an system for imageing,
but how I must configure the ramdisk?


Regards,
Marco

[stuart_b]

Okay, my thought was to "image" your PC by installing the remastered Knoppix to hard drive, or installing an unaltered Knoppix, but using settings for the default user saved to either to floppy or USB drive--since the settings for that user are copied to the default user when the system is installed to hard drive. That seems the simplest way to get multiple PCs configured alike, which is usually the aim of imaging systems.

I don't think there's really an easy way to use the CD drive when running the OS from a CD, since the system disc is mounted and can't be ejected. So the OS needs to be on another CD drive, a hard drive--or a USB drive if the PC supports booting from one. That does suggest a way around this without needing the PC to boot from USB--an external USB CD burner. You could boot from the internal drive, and when needed add an external burner.

[bfree]

I want to remaster an normal Knoppix, but after booting the cd must
be ejectable, because, I must burn a CD from this system.

I'd suggest looking at this thread in tips and tricks which describes how you can release the cd. You might want to think of using dsl with toram? Otherwise I think you'll have to make sure that all the programs it needs to create and burn the image are all loaded/cached before you eject the cd ...

[sgtdawg]

If you create a partition on your hard drive of about 700+MB you can boot from the CD and run from that partition by entering the fopllowing cheatcode at boot

knoppix tohd=/dev/hda1

This copies the cd to the hda1 partition and runs it from there, freeing up the CD drive. After you run this the first time you can change the code to run from the hard drive without re-copying all the data.

knoppix fromhd=/dev/hda1