I looked at El Torito a few years ago in this regard. It allows you to
have a choice of which floppy image gets booted so there is no space
problem. The first problem I saw at that time was a lack of support for
this feature in mkisofs. That might be solved now in mkhybrid, but the
bigger problem I see is that using this feature raises the bios
compatibility requirement quite a bit. I am highly in favor of other
techniques suggested which would initially load grub or similar boot
systems. Note that if debian was a tiny thing El Torito would be useful
because it allows multiple architectures to share a bootable CD. This
might be great if someone wants to put diags and memtest for multiple
arches on a CD that gets bundled with a book or magazine. I don't think it
is needed for the mother of all distros with it's thousands of packages :)
I should probably subscribe myself to debian-boot but I do appreciate
people posting things like this to both the boot and cd lists.
I would say that it won't bother me a bit if lots of packages get pushed
off of CD 1. I would love to be able to include lots of options when
binary CD 1 is booted. Besides the choice of kernels for initial install
purposes we could have options for rescue/repair and hardware
probing/diagnostics. I also was thinking about the timeout that causes a
boot from the hard drive if the user fails to interact. This is nice for
people who accidentally leave a bootable CD in a machine that they wish to
remotely reboot but it is also desirable for certain older machines with
stinky bios code. I have seen a few that do not have any setup option for
disabling CD boot. With these systems if I left an NT CD in the drive I
would get a delay(30 seconds I think) before it booted the hard drive. If
I left a debian CD in I would get the install/rescue bootup whether I was
at the machine or not.
On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, Jim Westveer wrote:
> Date: Wed, 10 Jan 2001 22:19:52 -0800 (PST)
> From: Jim Westveer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED],
> Robert Guthrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: regarding potato images
> Resent-Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2001 01:20:19 -0500
> Resent-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
> On 11-Jan-2001 Adam Di Carlo wrote:
> > Robert Guthrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> >
> >> Forgive my ignorance, but I just had to de-lurk to ask this probably silly
> >> question:
> >> Can't you have multiple kernel images on the same cd, chosen via lilo (or
> >> whatever boot loader is being used) just like when you have mulitple kernel
> >> versions on you computer?
> >
> > It is based on the El Torito boot standard -- I don't think this is
> > doable, partly in part due to boot-floppies itself. But even so, you
> > couldn't fit 4 kernels and the root.bin on a 2.8MB disk iamge.
> >
> > But I defer the debian-cd folks. I don't know all that much about it.
>
> El-Torito (ref: www.phoenix.com/products/specs-cdrom.pdf or others)
> is really just a floppy boot image of either 1.44M or 2.88M.
> That is why the boot-disk images are EXACTLY 1.44M or 2.88M in
> size, so they can just be copied to the boot1 area, and
> used "as-is" to make a CD/ROM boot.
>
> You may want to look at the debian-cd boot code from the
> CVS sources ( in tools/boot/potato/boot-i386 ) and see
> if you can hack it to support multiple images on the same CD.
>
> Ciao,
>
>
> --
> Jim Westveer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> "Bother," said Pooh as he struggled with sendmail.cf.
> "It never does quite what I want."
> "I wish Christopher Robin were here.".
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> work : 425-591-3002 Date: 10-Jan-2001
> FAX: 425-392-0141 Time: 22:02:16
> pgp-key 0x36129171 gpg-key 0x9823336C
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>
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+ Paul Wade Greenbush Technologies Corporation +
+ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.greenbush.com/ +
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