Booting /boot from a CD
 

Hi people!

I've realized there are a lot of people who have an old labtop, which doesn't have manufacturer support nowadays. When they plug a new hard drive to it, the system doesn't recognize the new hd and doesn't boot.

So the question is: Is there any way to install the boot loader (grub, for example), the kernel, the initrd and the /boot inside a bootable CD, so they can boot from it, where drivers are stored, so the system recognize the new hd and they can have the / mount point in the new hard drive?

Is it possible in Linux?

Thanks in advance.

It depends on why the system doesn't recognize the hard drive. If you are talking about a bios hard drive size limitation and putting a hard drive in that exceeds the bios size limit, you can usually work around that by partitioning the hard drive with a boot partition at the beginning of the hard drive that is smaller than the max size allowed by the bios.

You are right about linux not being bound by the bios hard drive size limit. Once the kernel loads, linux kisses the bios and its hard drive size limit goodbye. However, the bios will be in control until the kernel loads which is why you need your boot partition at the beginning and it must be smaller than the max allowed by the bios.

You can easily test whether linux will see the unrecognized hard drive by booting with any linux livecd and see if it sees the hard drive. A linux install cd should also see the hard drive; if not, you can't install linux on the system.

The reason would be that BIOS doesn't recognize the new hard drive. Then creating a smaller partition would not work, because BIOS doesn't recognize it, even if the partition size is smaller than BIOS recognize.

So I'm looking for a way to boot from CD, in which would be: boot loader, the kernel, initrd and /boot.

Does anyone know how to get it?

Regards.

Do you mean soemthing like a grub boot cd?

you put grub, grub4dos etc and use it to boot you installed systems?

If the bios does not detect the drive in any manner, you can pretty much forget it. The hardware is incompatible with the drive, the drive was not installed properly or the drive is defective.

It's very easy to test like I stated above. Boot with a linux livecd and see if the hard drive is picked up. If it is, you can probably work out a boot cd with grub to get to it. If not, you are wasting your time; it's not going to work if the linux kernel on some livecd can't see it. Your potential boot cd has to load some linux kernel that can see the drive in the first place.

Ok, thanks kilgoretrout and linus72!
I found these two sites where It's explained:
http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/man...le-CD-ROM.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ble-cd-140074/

Regards.