Quote Originally Posted by brentmid
I have a dual boot NT / Knoppix on a Toshiba laptop that has no CD drive and no floppy. I have an external PCMCIA CD drive, but to my knowledge, there is no way to boot knoppix off it, because it hangs very early in the process.

Here's how I got it working

2 partitions:
First is NTFS w/ WinXP
Second is FAT w/ Knoppix

MBR has the NTLDR bootloader.

I put w32grub in a separate directory on the NTFS drive. I set up boot.ini so NTLDR gives me the option of booting to WinXP or going to GRUB.

If I select GRUB, I have it pointing to the knoppix install on the FAT partition. To get this to work, I had to go to a second machine, make a boot floppy, and then copy the boot floppy files (vmlinuz and miniroot.gz) to the FAT partition via a network connection. GRUB uses those files to boot knoppix.

So now I can boot whatever I want without a floopy or CD.

w32grub is available at: http://www.skyjammer.com/files/knoppix/
good to hear that w32grub works for you. A litte trick that you may employ in the future(say KNOPPIX being updated).

There is a memdisk thing(I forgot if I put it in w32grub, if not you can get it from where you get syslinux, try google it) which allows you to boot floppy image from within GRUB, that is very nice for notebook users without CD/floppy. It works like the following(in GRUB) example

title "KNOPPIX 2003-11-04"
kernel /boot/memdisk
initrd /boot/knoppix_boot.img

so all you need is to copy the 1.44M boot image from the KNOPPIX CD if you have a CD-ROM(even not bootable). If you don't or don't want to burn one, there are shareware floating around that allows you to peek into ISO9660 image and extract files from it. There is even a nice little utility which is called knoppix-customize(that can extract files, no GUI) which you can search on this forum.

So with w32grub, memdisk and knoppix-customize, one can inject KNOPPIX(and later other flavor of linux once there is a version of linux) into a Windows XP/NTFS jailed machine with no floppy/cd-rom or any machine which is has boot option restricted to HD only, so long there is a network connection and one can modify boot.ini.