At 01:40 PM 4/7/00 +0200, you wrote:
>brian davison wrote:
>
>> At 09:39 AM 4/6/00 +0100, you wrote:
>> >On Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 12:51:55PM +0200, Rodrigo Moya wrote:
>> >>
>> >> I've got an image of a partition (made with the dd command) that I want
>> >> to put on a system with DOS/Windows 3.1. This system has no floppy,
>> >> cdrom, nor network card, and it's got only one hard disk of 72 MB. I
>> >> connect a zip drive to it to get the image file, but before doing so,
>> >> I'd need to create the linux partition to copy the image to (or not? is
>> >> it ok to just overwrite the DOS partition?).
>> >[...]
>> >
>> >Hm - is it maybe possible to create a minimal Linux system on the Zip
>> >drive and boot from the Zip drive?
>> >
>> >Thomas
>> >--
>> >
>> ... YES ........ if the zip is otherwise recognized as
>> bootable....
>> brian :)_
>
>That's it. How can I boot the zip drive either directly (as first boot
>device), or from DOS?
>
It doesn't have to be bootable. You just have to be able to read the zip
disk with both dos and have the zip disk supported in your kernel.
the answer probably lies in the doslinux distribution to be found on
ftp://tux.org
the details are there in the readme (s). this distrib's files are copied to
the dos file structure. (as in dos/win 3.1 ...) I don't remember what you
want to use it for so I can't be sure, but this one installs into a loop
file system residing as a file in the dos structure. the first step in this
is a small system which runs in a ramdisk, and loads from the dos prompt
using loadline. The kernel could be any you choose, whatever features are
desired. The small system is used to do the setup of the loop system.
I've found it valuable as a testing and repair tool.
If the system can presently access the zip drive the doslinux files could be
copied to that system. If you have the kernel already that can access the
zip drive once the kernel is loaded... that would be the kernel to use.
It would also need to support ramdisk and loop file system.
Once the ramdisk system could mount the zip drive, then you can run fdisk
on the 72 meg drive and create the linux filesystem and swap partitions and
then move the linux image over.
THe scary part of this is that if it doesn't boot thereafter I don't know
how to get it back up again.......
is this a real hard drive, or is one of those solid state drives that
emulates a DOS file system? If it's one of the latter I suggest you run
the linux as a loop system residing on the DOS file system. There is a
little penalty in performance, but nothing as bad as having to rewrite the
file system emulation software roms... to get linux to come up all you have
to do is use autoexec.bat to call loadline linux loader, it works slick.
Sorry this is disjointed, and took so long to reply, but real life keeps me
from doing computers except at odd hours, and new thoughts came up while
typing and I didn't rewrite to compensate.
brian. :) let me know how it goes.
******
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