[Xastir] New tricks for Linux / XASTIR was: knoppix qemu

[Jeremy Utley]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 16:37:24 -0500, John Kraus <jfkraus3 at cox.net> wrote:

> Actually what I would like to see is a set of either boot floppies and / or
> cdrom that does nothing more than make a default USB access drive as ROOT
> with the kernel running in a separate RAMDISK.
> 
> With a boot disk in hand and a USB 2.0 external drive you would be good to
> go with an easily modified system.

Piece of cake!  MS-DOS bootable floppy with loadlin and a kernel on it
- kernel would need USB and usb_storage compiled in (not as a module),
as well as usb hard drive support.

With these two things, you could boot to a MS-DOS command prompt, then
use loadlin to load the kernel:

loadlin kernel root=/dev/sda1

This would load the kernel on the floppy, and tell that kernel to use
the USB device as the root filesystem.

I used to use a process similar to this to boot a linux install stored
on a parallel port zip drive.

Jeremy, NW7JU