Jonathan Kline wrote: > > Okay heres the deal: > I need/want to make myself a system admin disk. I want it bootable and > able to boot linux(maybe the bbc), dos, and a memory checker whichs can be > booted through lilo. Has anyone ever written lilo to a cdr or cdrw? Once I > get the bootable stuff done, I need to add some other files, and sys admin > tools, like fdisk, format.... Ghost, Drive Image................. Most of > the stuff I need from a day to day bais. I want this cd to be the bomb. > Anyone have any ideas as to how to do the bootable thing with dos, linux and > the memory manger? Well, this shouldn't be that hard. To start off, make a directory on a Linux box where you want to put everything together. I'd fill it with a minimal filesystem of utilities and whatnot. I presume you'll be using a regular 5" CD? You can afford to dump a lot of stuff in there. The boot scripts will take a lot of fiddling (but hey, that's what CD-RW's are for ;-) Print out the man pages for init and other basic system programs and read them thoroughly. Take a lot of notes, etc.. In addition to all of this Linux stuff, create a directory named DOS or some other obvious name. dump DOS fdisk, format, etc. in there. You can also create a UTILS subdirectory for all of the DOS utilities you want to use. It would probably be a good idea to put LOADLIN.EXE in that directory as well. At some point, you had to make a diskette to get this whole thing to boot. I'd recommend making a DOS diskette that includes the drivers necessary for reading your CDROM. You don't really need anything else on that disk, as you can put any other utilities (mouse drivers, etc) on the CD itself, and it makes for a faster boot when you read as little as possible from the diskette. After a while, you'll get brave and make an image of the diskette (dd is your friend). You can include that image when you run mkisofs or whatever program you run to make the ISO image from that directory structure you made up above. Your CD will now boot DOS. You can get it to boot Linux with a batch file that calls LOADLIN with the correct parameters (oops, I almost forgot, you have to put a linux kernel somewhere on the CD). The LinuxCare BBC has some routines for automatically figuring out where the root filesystem is. You'd have to modify that to look for an iso9660 filesystem instead of ext2, but that shouldn't be a big problem. Of course, if you're feeling masochistic, you can put the whole Linux filesystem into a (possibly compressed) image. I don't think that's really necessary unless you really want to cram a huge amount of data onto the disc. Keep in mind that I've never actually done this.. -- _ _ _ _ _ ___ _ _ _ ___ _ _ __ Why do we wash bath / \/ \(_)| ' // ._\ / - \(_)/ ./| ' /(__ towels? Aren't we clean \_||_/|_||_|_\\___/ \_-_/|_|\__\|_|_\ __) when we use them? [ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088/ | mailto:hick0088 at tc.umn.edu ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: tclug-list-unsubscribe at mn-linux.org For additional commands, e-mail: tclug-list-help at mn-linux.org