HOWTO: Poor Man's Dual Boot PC!

[A. Jorge Garcia]

J.drake, you may want to look at this!

Good Luck,

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, I got sick of this machine that came preinstalled with WINXP and NTFS. So, I reinstalled WINXP on VFAT32.

I copied the entire contents of /cdrom/KNOPPIX/* to c:\KNOPPIX.

Its also easy to make the DOS Boot Floppy! Just go to My Computer and click on the floppy. Then if you click on format there's a choice for formatting a boot floppy! All you have to do is add the autoexec.bat file.

Works like a charm!

Regards,

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, now I've installed a "Poor Man's Dual Boot" on my new lab of Dell Optiplex GX270s. These machinces came with 3 VFAT32 partitions. hda1 was setup as a rescue disk of 32MB, hda2 is about 10GB and has a full M$ WINDOZE XP install and hda5 is about 10GB and is empty (we ordered these with 2 10GB VFAT32 partitions). So here's what I did to install the lastest version of KNOPPIX on these new PCs.

Step0A: download latest *.iso and cdrecord it
Step0B: place old DOSBootFloppy in /mnt/floppy (I have loadlin.exe there)

Step1A: mount hda5 (click desktop hda5 icon)
Step1B: make hda5 rw (right click desktop hda5 icon, click change rw and click yes)

Step2A: open a root shell (click <K><KNOPPIX><ROOT>)
Step2B: mkdir /mnt/hda5/knoppix
Step2C: mount /mnt/cdrom/KNOPPIX/boot.img tmp -o loop

Step3A: cp tmp/* /mnt/hda5/knoppix
Step3B: cp /mnt/floppy/loadlin.exe /mnt/hda5/knoppix
Step3C: cp /mnt/cdrom/KNOPPIX/* /mnt/hda5/knoppix

Now you can reboot with your modified DOSBootFloppy (see previous post and http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2273) once you've updated autoexec.bat's loadlin line with any new boot cheatcodes as needed!

Enjoy,

[flamesrock]

Impressive.

So if I understand right, it's possible to put Knoppix on a windows (FAT32) drive and boot it from a floppy -- or even a seperate partition for increased speed??

And you CAN write to the drive and save data and settings?? (Without too much of a hassle.)

If all this is infact possible, I have one simple (err..maybe complex) question:

I want to install Knoppix on the drive of a family computer for personal use. Everybody else wants to use windows. However, the only way my parents would allow this is if I kept it virtually invisible - meaning no bootloaders - since their simplistic brains cannot appreciate the beauty of lilo.

At the same time, I want to make it load reasonable fast. So is there a way to somehow merge the partition idea and the bootdisk idea, so that when I boot the floppy, it would command the partition to fling me into linux with maximum speed? Maybe not by means of lilo, but anything would do.

Hope I make some sense.

-Thanks

[A. Jorge Garcia]

With the DOSBootFloppy, as opposed to the KNOPPIXBootFloppy (kernel based), everything boots faster because vmlinuz and and miniroot.gz are read from the hdd, not the floppy. This is faster than the CD boot too, but not faster than hdinstall boot.

Also, the DOSBootFloppy is a DOS formatted disk so you cannot use knoppix.sh to save settings. However, as this is not a kernel based boot disk, there's room on the disk to save files that you create (~500KB).

This is a very "invisible" setup and I use it at home and at work.

Good Luck,

[A. Jorge Garcia]

BTW, in the "Poor Man's Dual Boot" method, you're essentially copying the KNOPPIX read-only compressed file system to a hdd. Therefore, it will still work like it s on a CD. So you can't save anything to the hdd unless you setup another partition to write to. That's why I save to /mnt/floppy.

Regards,

[flamesrock]

Thanks for the reply.

I just finished doing this on the win 98 computer. However when I booted it up from the floppy it did not work -- saying something about not being able to find the kernal image. It was not a completely empty disc however (had some files formated for windows on it.) But I assumed that this wouldn't effect it.

Plus when it was making the CD, it said something about an input/output error. I'll try making another boot CD and report back.

Anyways..here's something else I found while just surfing:

http://linuxconsole.tuxfamily.org/index.php?langue=en

It's very similar to knoppix and uses a different method to boot from windows (see this link for detailed info http://linuxconsole.tuxfamily.org/ho...langue=en#Boot)

I just thought that you guys at the knoppix forums might be interested in checking it out

[flamesrock]

Ahh -- it works now!

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, just to streamline the process a bit, here's what I've been doing lately.

Step0
*download latest ISO and cdrecord it (assuming you have a linux box)
*place old DOSBootFloppy in /mnt/floppy (I added loadlin.exe there)

Step1
*mount hda5 (click desktop hda5 icon)
*make hda5 rw (right click desktop hda5 icon, click change rw)
*delete the /mnt/hda5/knoppix directory if it already exists

Step2
*open a root shell (click <K><KNOPPIX><ROOT>) and type:
mkdir /mnt/hda5/knoppix
mount /mnt/cdrom/KNOPPIX/boot.img tmp -o loop
cp tmp/* /mnt/hda5/knoppix
cp /mnt/floppy/loadlin.exe /mnt/hda5/knoppix
cp /mnt/cdrom/KNOPPIX/* /mnt/hda5/knoppix

FIN!!!

BTW, just go get some coffee and order out for pizza while that last step completes. Depending on cdrom drive speed, I've has this take from 5-15 minutes!

NB, the part about deleting an old /mnt/hda5/knoppix is new.

Enjoy,