remastering without re-partitioning

**Poison_BL** · 10-25-2004, 05:28 PM

hey, this may have been asked before, but is it possible to remaster using loopback filesystem images to set up the system then make cloop images of their contents? if this makes no sense i can try to be more clear.

i was considering ways to set up a (very lightweight) system for an old pc at home and figured it would be easiest to either use a cleaned up knoppix (or modified feather perhaps) as a base, but i just finished playing partitioning on my main system and don't want to do that all over again

, ... i like my new LFS system too much

my idea came from having played a little with Bochs in the past, it uses a filesystem image as it's "harddrive" and i remembered that i can mount that FS as it's own drive straight from my base linux system. instead of repartitioning, you can create an image of the desired size (i.e. 200 MB)

Code:

 dd if=/dev/zero of=filesystem.img bs=1k count=204800

then use mkfs.ext2 on it the same way you would a normal device, then mount it loopback, ... as far as the system (outside mount and the kernel) knows, it's just another ext2 partition ... just an off the wall idea ...