[techtalk] Running Linux from a zip disk.

Conor Daly conor.daly at oceanfree.net
Thu Mar 22 01:50:46 EST 2001


On Wed, Mar 21, 2001 at 11:03:21PM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
Magni Onsoien thought:
> jenn at simegen.com:
> > The biggest question is whether the BIOS is set up to boot from
> > zip disks. And if you can change the BIOS to boot from the zip
> > disk without any hassles - and without 'messing up much' with 
> > the computers.
> > 
> > I'm not terribly familiar with zip disks (make that 'not at all')
> > but if they're basically portable hard drives, I can't see them
> > being any different. Provided the BIOS will boot from them.
> 
> What about booting from a floppy disk, with rootfs on the floppy?
> That should work, I think. Maybe. (I have never used a zip disk)
> Of course the sysadmins may (wisely ;)) have chosen to protect
> againstbooting from anything but a harddrive, but it's more likely that
> floppy boot is available than zip boot.
If zip boot isn't available but you can access the zip disk from MS-DOS, 
you might be able to use loadlin on the zip disk at that point but that's 
guesswork on my part.
> Make kernel, remember support for zip ("Generic SCSI device", I think),
> rdev the kernel to use rootfs on /dev/sda (or b if there is another
> scsi-disk in the box),  set up lilo etc.
> 
I have a SuSE 7.0 Live Evaluation CD.  It boots from CD, installs a 100Mb
file on the HD for writeable space (including /home) which I think you can
resize or at least specify as larger and doesn't affect the M$ setup at
all.  You're welcome to a copy if you wish.
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
---------------------
Faenor.cod.ie
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