It's down to about 195MB... this is by no means the final product, this is just so that I can test it to see if it actually works.

ok, I've gotten myself a little bit farther, but I've run into another wall.

So I figured out that the ramdisk isn't set up before the cloop image is mounted.. great. so I made the /ramdisk directory on miniroot and put it onto a boot floppy.

so I let it start up with no cd in the drive so I'd get dumped at the crappy ash prompt, and loaded the reiserfs.o module from another disk so I could access my cloop image from the hard drive.
everything's going fine until this point, no problems.. I mount the hard drive to /cdrom and mount the ramdisk by "mount -t tmpfs /dev/shm /ramdisk".
then instead of copying, i try "cat /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX > /ramdisk/KNOPPIX". this goes through fine, but then when i try "insmod cloop.o file=/ramdisk/KNOPPIX", it gives me some error message about something not matching(damn.. can't remember the word right now. it was like "final (something) is 2..(big number) and not 13...(another big number)".

sooo.. my guess is cat messes up the image on it's way over to the ramdisk. any idea why or how i could fix it?