loadlin-like loading of knoppix from a win2k/NT/XP session

[mack]

I spent the weekend to fix this XP patch and now can install GRUB on either FAT or NTFS under XP. Should also work under W2K/NT but definitely not 95/98/ME(they are cripped win32 that the program will not run) where I believe loadlin is a better solution.

Great. I also had a knoppix weekend - was debugging what seems to be an evil race bug in the xsession-knoppix package. Will post on that in a new thread.

Do you need a test environment for testing it with win2k (C:\ = NTFS) ?

When xpgrub fails (on 95/98/ME), does it do any damage or does it just exit with some error code ? If it fails gracefully, the script can detect it and assume 95/98/ME (or maybe there's a better way to detect windows version. I'm not familiar with windows but I'm sure it has something equiv to uname(1)). Once the script figures a dos-based version of windows is in place, it will add a boot option with loadlin.

I would mail you the files after I clean them up a bit. Too bad I can't find a place where I can setup a website so people can download from there as I believe it would be quite useful for situation where booting from floppy/cd-rom is disable. A KNOPPIX like system can slip into an XP machine by :

Cool! I think knoppix (and other systems) will benefit from that.
Re website for it, I'll create a dir for it on a server here. Mail me the content you want there.

In fact, I learnt a neat trick on GRUB mailing list that I can boot a CD-ROM from GRUB through Smart Boot Manager for those non-IDE CD-ROMs like PCMCIA connected one(that is the feature of SBM), or as mentioned a machine with CD-ROM booting disabled. So it is possible to just have grub(and friends installed) and boot KNOPPIX CD from there. Of course, for odd CD-ROMs, the initrd in the KNOPPIX CD needs to be changed to load the proper drivers before it start the search of itself

yes, Smart Boot Manager looks cool. However, as far as I can tell it has no USB support yet. I already modified the initrd to support the USB cdrom, but since Smart Boot Manager won't be able to handle it by itself, I'll just use the above script to load vmlinuz+initrd from C:\boot\ and have them handle the USB stuff.