Hi mr_ed

Thank you for the reply! I was able to set my fstab the way I liked it, and now I understand better how knoppix boots. But I found in the same file, on line 486:

Code:
# / must be rw in any case, starting from here
mount -o remount,rw / 2>/dev/null
so it remounts root as rw anyway. Back to square #1, I booted again from CD, and found that it creates a 2mb root partition on "/dev/root", then fills it with a default filesystem full of symlinks to the CD. It's great! All the binaries are run from the CD image, but / is still a writable partition for temporary files.

Now I'm stuck though. Where does it get /dev/root from? And what populates it with the filesystem full of symlinks? I suspect the answer lies in a pivitroot call, but I don't know much about pivitroot, or where it's called from. I didn't find any hints in the knoppix-autoconf script.

Basically, I want to be able to do this same thing when booting from the hard drive: mount the hard drive as read-only, then create a root mountpoint that contains this same default filesystem as when booting from the CD. Then I would have a temporary root filesystem that could be trashed and thrown away, and start over when the box is rebooted.

Are there any hints for where I should look to accomplish this?

Thanks all!

Al