I am currently running ME and XP(dual boot using XP boot loader) on my Dell Inspiron 2500 with a 10G disk. Because of the limited space available and it has already been paritioned with a FAT32(for Window ME) and NTFS(for XP), I don't want to repartition it and reinstall everything, I decid to follow the route mentioned in

http://www.knoppix.net/docs/index.php/FaqHdBased

Because I don't like floppy at all as it is slow and in many case not reliable, I decided to use lilo as the boot loader to boot KNOPPIX from the harddisk(as described in the link). However, I want to continue to use the XP boot loader as the main boot loader and chain boot into lilo, some additional steps are needed.

1. I made a copy of the current boot sector records(both MBR and the partition, just in case) :

dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/auto/hda1/hdaboot.xp bs=512 count=1
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/auto/hda1/hda1boot.xp bs=512 count=1

2. I follow the instructions in the above link to setup LILO which would overwrite the boot sector at /dev/hda1(my FAT32 partition or C:\ drive in M$ terms). I made a copy of it by

dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/auto/hda1/hda1boot.lnx bs=512 count=1

3. Put back the NT/XP boot loader with

dd of=/dev/hda1 of=/mnt/auto/hda1/hda1boot.xp bs=512 count=1

3. edit the NT boot loader config file C:\BOOT.INI or /mnt/auto/hda1/boot.ini and add the following line :

C:\hda1boot.lnx="KNOPPIX"

reboot and I can happily choose between ME/XP/KNOPPIX. I have also added the necessary cheat codes in the lilo.conf so I don't have to enter it every time.

However, using this method to boot, I notice something that I don't like which is, KNOPPIX mount the device containing /KNOPPIX as "ro" which means that I can no longer access my FAT32 partition for storing things I want(passing files around). I then deompressed the miniboot.gz and make the necessary change in "linuxrc".

The pros of booting from HD is that it is much faster(and quieter) than running from CD(mine is 24x) and I don't need to burn a CD each time a newKNOPPIX release comes out as I can just mount the .iso image and copy the new 700M KNOPPIX to my FAT32.

While going through the linuxrc, I notice that I can also make the home and var directories persistant on my FAT32 too(haven't tried yet).

Just hope this can help if someone need to put KNOPPIX on a ME/XP system where repartitioning is not an option. In this way, all that is needed is a sub-directory KNOPPIX to store everything which can be removed easily.