Cheatcodes explanation

**pnti** · 09-23-2003, 10:43 AM

Hi:

Could anyone explain me the meaning of three cheatcodes:

1) toram - "Copy CD to RAM and run from there". Hm. I have only 256 MB RAM. How much should I have to run Knoppix from RAM ?

2) tohd - "knoppix tohd=/dev/hda1" Will it install Knoppix on my hard disk on the first partition ?

3) fromhd ?????

Thank you.

w.

**Lex** · 09-25-2003, 12:03 AM

1) It takes about 700MB of RAM to place Knoppix into it so you should have 1GB to make Knoppix run smooth. 850MB are OK, but you will not be able to run several big programs simultaneously.

2) tohd copies the compressed Knoppix image from the CD to the HDD (and loads the OS from there) - it's not a real installation since you cannot write to this image.

3) fromhd forces Knoppix to load from an image that was previously copied to the HDD. So if you runned Knoppix with tohd once, next time you can use fromhd (to avoid the image being copied to the HDD again - it would be a waste of time).

**pnti** · 09-25-2003, 10:42 AM

Thank you very much !

I guess that it is possible to start Knoppix copied to the hd using a boot floppy. Am I right?

**Dave_Bechtel** · 09-25-2003, 12:00 PM

...yep! In fact, if you do this a lot you can make a small FAT partition on the HD and boot the floppy image from there. Much faster, especially if you don't have a floppy drive / can't boot from CD.

Code:

fdisk -l /dev/hda
Disk /dev/hda: 255 heads, 63 sectors, 9962 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1             1       204   1638598+   b  Win95 FAT32
/dev/hda2   *       205       206     16065   83  Linux
/dev/hda3           207       207      8032+  83  Linux
/dev/hda4           208      9962  78357037+   f  Win95 Ext'd (LBA)

--Use Partition magic or qtparted or whatever to resize, and create a small 1-or-2 cylinder partition. Type doesn't actually matter, it can say type 83 and still boot FAT.

' dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda3 bs=1M ' == Do this for your new partition to initialize with zeros
' dd if=/cdrom/knoppix/boot.img of=/dev/hda3 bs=1M ' == Copy the boot.img file from CD to the HD

--Now to boot Knoppix without using a floppy:
' activate /dev/hda 3 ' (the space is important! See "man activate") and reboot.

--To get things back to normal:
' activate /dev/hda 1 '. This sets the boot flag back to Windows. To activate the linux boot flag from DOS, use fdisk.

--Note: When Knoppix revs to a new release, you have to update the boot image! In that case, boot from CD or floppy at first and dd the boot.img file again.

--Now I realize this is a bit complicated, but it works for me.

Klaus also did a neat thing and added a cheatcode, "fromhd" so you can boot the CD and it will look for poor man's install and run from there instead of using a boot floppy.