From: hlu@eecs.wsu.edu (H.J. Lu) Subject: bootable root disks are on tsx-11. Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1992 22:28:25 GMT
They are floppy disks with minix filesystems on it. You can mount them. They
are also bootable. 1.2 MB version can only boot once. Don't know why.
BTW, My bootable rootdisks don't use RAM disk.
H.J.
============README.rootdisk=======
These are bootable root disk for Linux. Kernel is 0.97 patch level 6
with Ted's one line fix for serial.c. There are some basic binaries on
root disk, all of which are linked with jump table 4.1. They are on
tsx-11.mit.edu under pub/linux/GCC/rootdisk.
This is a partial list of what are on root disk.
1. bash 1.12
2. gnu tar 1.10 (tar.Z)
3. compress 4.2.3
4. elvis 1.6
5. chmod, chown, cp, ls, mv, rm, ln, fsck, mkfs and setroot.
6. mount, umount, swapon
7. more
There are two versions of rootdisk, one, 3rootdisk.Z, for 1.44MB drive,
the other, 5rootdisk.Z, for 1.2MB drive. Please do
1. uncompress [3|5]rootdisk.Z.
2. rawrite or dd it to a floppy disk.
3. boot that floppy disk.
My A: drive is 1.44MB. It works fine with me. But I have some problem
with 1.2MB root disk. It can boot first time you use it. After that,
LILO 0.5 fails to load it. You have to make a fresh copy again. Since I
don't use it myself. I will leave it for others to fix it.
I haven't got fdisk sources yet. So there are no fdisk on rootdisks.
You have to know the partitions to use mkfs. BTW, since there are not
enough rooms on 1.2MB floppy, I left a few things out, like su, passwd
and mkswap.
If you want to use it to install Linux on your HD, you are on your own.
Everything is there. But you have to know how to use them. Suppose you
want to install Linux on partition, /dev/hdxx, whose size is yyyy K
bytes, you can do
mkfs /dev/hdxx yyyyy
mount /dev/hdxx /mnt
cd /mnt
mkdir bin
cp /bin/tar.Z /mnt/bin
chmod 755 /mnt/bin
uncompress /mnt/bin/tar
(cd /; /mnt/bin/tar cf - ./* ) | (cd /mnt; /mnt/bin/tar xvvf -)
You have to do these:
cd /lib
cp libc.so.4.1 /mnt/lib
cp libm.so.4.0 /mnt/lib
This will save some disk spaces since cp can make holes and tar can't.
You now should edit /mnt/etc/fstab to make sure /dev/hdxx will be
mounted as root. There are some examples in /mnt/etc/fstab.
After that, use `setroot' to change /mnt/vmunix with
setroot /mnt/vmunix /mnt/dev/hdxx 508 # (still 508?)
then
cd /mnt/etc/lilo
rm map boot.????
export ROOT=/mnt # do I have to do this?
./lilo -r /mnt -b /dev/hdxx -i boot.b -v -v -v /vmunix
Now, you can boot Linux from your HD. To install the other stuffs
should be very trivial now since you have tar and compress on your HD
, and you can boot Linux off your HD. I suggest you get my bonuses come
with jump table 4.1.
I will try to update my root disk regularly with Linus' new kernel. But
I may not do the same for 1.2MB floppy version since I have to open my
machine to do this.
This root disk works on my machine with 100MB IDE drive. I don't know
anything about your machine or SCSI. Wish you good luck.
Correct me if I am wrong. Tell me about your story.
Thanks.
H.J.
hlu@eecs.wsu.edu
09/23/09