Problems remastering the ISO

[kl522]

That's weird. At this stage I could only guess that your 'mkisofs' somehow is not encoding things for 'isolinux' to read 'isolinux.cfg' correctly, ie even though isolinux.cfg is there and present, it is not able to read it or it is not reading it correctly. This is likely related to locale issues ( keyboard, language and so on ). For that matter, you are unable to produce a bootable CD using 'mkisofs'.

The thing to note is that now your current error message is actual one step backward from before. Before this, you were having problem error message from 'init', that at least, it means isolinux is able to boot 'linux', and 'linux' is able to load minirt.gz.

[klaus2008]

So the image is larger than I started with and I only added two packages and removed over a dozen.

I think that the size of the compressed image file is larger than the old one although you deleted some packages because you do not use the best compression method. You always use zlib's best compression method but 7zip does a better job in most cases. Therefore I would suggest that you try the option -L -1 to get a smaller compressed image file. There is also the option -b which instructs create_compressed_fs to try all of the compression methods available and keep the best one but it needs much more time. You can get a list of the available options if you issue create_compressed_fs -h.

root@Microknoppix:/home/knoppix# create_compressed_fs -h
1 processor core(s) detected
Usage: advfs [options] INFILE OUTFILE [HOSTS...]
Options:
-b Try all and choose the best compression method, see -L
-B N Set the block size to N
-m Use memory for temporary data storage (NOT recommended)
-r Reuse output file as temporary file (NOT recommended)
-p M Set a default value for port number to M
-l Listening mode (as remote node)
-t T Total number of compressing threads
-s Q Expect data with size Q from the input, see below
-f S Temporary file S (or see -r)
-q Don't print periodic status messages to the console
-v Verbose mode, print extra statistics
-h Help of the program
-S X Experimental option: store volume header in file X, see manpage
Performance tuning options:
-a U Job pool size (default: threadcount+3)
-L V Compression level (-2..9); 9: zlib's best (default setting), 0: none,
-1: 7zip, -2: do all and keep the best one

To use standard input/output - can be used as INFILE/OUTFILE. However, this will
require additional memory (or diskspace) for data size calculation and header
update (after compression). Passing the INPUT data size with -s may help.
The size numbers can be declared with a suffix which acts as multiplier
(K: KiB, k: KB, i: iso9660 block (2KiB); M: MiB; m: MB; G: GiB; g: GB).

So, is there a size limit for the KNOPPIX compressed image?

The size limit for the compressed image is 4 GB because you cannot create a larger file on a device that uses the FAT32 filesystem otherwise you are not able to use the flash installation utility.

[kl522]

boot:
Could not find kernel image: knoppix

Another clue to the problem is that, the isolinux is looking for 'knoppix' as the kernel image; whereas a "conventional" knoppix kernel image is 'linux'. Here it seems to suggest a malformed isolinux.cfg.

[job317]

To fix the insanity aspect (repeating same steps and expecting different outcome), this morning I did a test build on a different system and it worked fine. My resulting ISO booted with no errors.

So, there is something different about the original build system which is functioning fine otherwise.

I will continue with my customized, remastered Knoppix disk on the different system now. It may be helpful to troubleshoot the issue should I find the time but for now I will continue my work and be done.

Thanks for all your attempts to assist.

Regards,

Job