On Mon, 5 Nov 2001 18:53, Harry Palmer wrote: > I have a (decent, 400MHz PII) laptop with no CDROM and an LS120 IDE > floppy drive instead of a standard floppy (which boot disks pick up as > hdd). > > Is that me stuffed as far as getting potato up and running? I tried a > few things with the idepci boot set, but there doesn't seem to be a > way of getting beyond the first boot floppy and getting the root > filesystem loaded. Has anybody been here before?
Couldn't you reconfigure the boot disk to use root=/dev/hdd? From memory the Potato boot disk uses loadlin so it should be easy to change the specification for the root device. One thing I have been considering is to create a NFS-root floppy for laptops. This would involve an initrd kernel using busybox (or some other statically linked program with lots of utilities) with cardmgr compiled in. Then the /linuxrc could start pcmcia, put the network up, and have a network start script that mounts NFS and does pivot_root and "exec /sbin/init". This can only be done with woody, however the image on the NFS server could be any version of Linux as long as it doesn't stop the PCMCIA... ;) To do this I need to squeeze the kernel modules necessary and all the cardmgr stuff into 440K of gzip -9 compressed space. If you're interested in testing this then let me know. -- http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/ Bonnie++ hard drive benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/postal/ Postal SMTP/POP benchmark http://www.coker.com.au/projects.html Projects I am working on http://www.coker.com.au/~russell/ My home page -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
