On Wed, 7 Jan 1998, Turbo Fredriksson wrote:
> On Tue, 6 Jan 1998, Dale Scheetz wrote:
>
> > I am set up to boot several linux partitions as well as
> > a dos partition and a loop-root system. I am much happier editing that
> > beast myself thankyou ;-)
>
> A loop-root?
>
With a small patch to the kernel and some modification of the loop device
code, you can create a file-system-in-a-file. Using the loop device
the internal file system can be mounted as the root file system for the
kernel. These patches were never adopted by the kernel, and it is getting
harder and harder to apply them, so I currently use a patched 2.0.27
kernel to boot that system.
I provide this monstrosity as "Drop in Debian", configured to provide a
platform on a DOS machine sufficient to building a custom kernel. The
concept is easily expandable to take over whatever disk space you have
available ;-)
The one I boot with lilo is on an ext2 partition (another beauty of the
imbeded file system, it can be coppied to almost any other file system).
Interesting point: on an ext2 file system, no care need be taken. On a DOS
file system the file system must be un-fragmented (using dfrag) before the
DiD installation will work properly. The funny part of this is that it
doesn't matter whether you do the dfrag before you copy the file system,
or afterwards, it still works. Without it you get file system errors.
This was an interesting concept when I first ran into it, but the need for
it is slowly going away. I keep the one file system around for testing
purposes, as it's easy to make a back up copy of the system, do
testing...destroy the file system completely, and recover to the initial
state by simply copying the backup file over the broken one.
Luck,
Dwarf
--
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