Giuliano Procida <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > It is possible to fool the installation process roughly as follows:
> You need a DOS partition, say /dev/hda1, umssync, and perhaps other > things (it's been a while). Replace the boot-floppy kernel with one > that has FAT and UMSDOS compiled in. Ah, you make it sound so easy ;-) I can't seem to get this right. I copy the kernel to the file linux and run ./rdev.sh. This script tries to run "rdev /mnt/linux /dev/ram0" - and there is no /dev/ram0. Why does the script ask for something Debian doesn't supply? Anyway, if I ignore this error or run the command manually with /dev/ram (which I do have), and boot the floppy, it stops here: RAMDISK: compressed image found at block 0 VFS: Mounted root (minix filesystem) Root is mounted from /dev/ram /etc/rc done. And then it just sits there. I can get a shell at Alt-F2, but obviously something must be wrong so I didn't try going any further. What could cause this? The other instructions you gave seem easy enough to follow, but unfortunately I didn't get that far :-( >> Unfortunately, after a message of VFS: Mounted umsdos >> filesystem as root (or similar), the system hangs in an endless loop >> continuously reading the harddisk. > You seem to have got most of the way. What messages does it give? Just that. Perhaps this was caused by the remounting in /etc/init.d/boot? I didn't know I had to change that. In the mean time I deleted the test harddisk partition so I can't easily try again. > As an alternative, you could try my modifications to the boot-floppies > package to handle UMSDOS installs. There has just been a new > boot-floppies release, so I'll have do some merging before I have a > proper set of patches ready. Have a look at > ftp://pootle.magd.cam.ac.uk/ if you are interested (patches against > boot-floppies 1.2.5). My mirror doesn't carry 1.2.5, only 1.2.4. It seems there's some stuff specific to your system in the patch (I saw some copying of loadlin); was I too early downloading it? > In your other message you mentioned a ZIP drive, can't you format a > disk as ext2? Or is that not a possibility for you? Not really. I want Debian to run from the ZIP disk so I can take it to my father's place and run Linux there. This way, I don't need a special boot floppy, or files on his harddisk. I just insert the ZIP disk and get Linux. This is only possible using umsdos. (I am a bit surprised, actually, that Debian doesn't support installation to umsdos). Thanks for your help, Gertjan. -- Gertjan Klein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
