Booting Slackware off a hard-drive from MS/DOS or old Windows using loadlin, anyone?
 

If liloconfig detects that the target partition is a FAT one, it suggests just that. And loadlin-1.6e.zip is available in the /kernels directory of Slackware 14.0.

Just wondering: is this history or does anyone still uses that? (knowing that if I am correct loadlin is usable only for MS/DOS and Windows versions <= ME).

PS I'd be a little bit surprised to receive a positive answer as liloconfig tries to figure if we are installing from a usmdos.gz root disk, but I could be wrong...

By the way, liloconfig checks the presence of an OS/2 Boot Manager as well, but I'll ask for that in another thread.

PS2 No need for answers like "I do (or did) that to boot Slackware 3.3" (at least in this thread).

PS3. OK, forget about OS/2 boot manager. No urgent need for internationalizing, let alone localizing dead code.

I don't see any reason that loadlin wouldn't still work. Might be an issue if using a very large initrd, if anything. "Windows versions <= ME" -that's correct. For newer systems you might use grub4dos instead -despite the name it's the one for newer (or older) win systems.

Thanks for your answer, gnashley.

In addition, I would be pleased to know of any practical experience of doing that with Slackware 14.0

Hello, Didier

Wikipedia has an article about "FAT filesystem and Linux."

Last time I used loadlin would have been for Slackware-9.1. You can find tips on how to do it for the old zipslack version of slackware.

Thanks gnashley and Poucket, but I am not in need to do that myself. Rather, I'm trying to figure out if that feature is still useful for anyone or could be removed (or at least commented out in liloconfig) for the next Slackware version.

Sorry if that was not clear from my first post, my excuse being that English is not my native language.

That would have been my answer. :) I spent some time rummaging through kernels on the slackware ftp site until I found one that gave me
a root prompt after running loadlin.