hi,

i have a floppy disk with some recovery utils etc on ( a linux disk )
mainly its a backup of config files etc.

i have some free un-partitioned space on my drive and wondered if i could make an image of the disk and have it as a bootable partition on my drive ?

is this possible to do?

would i have to use fdisk to create a partition on my drive then use dd to copy the image into the resulting /dev/hda9 partition?

then i would like to add it to my lilo, would that be a case of copying a lilo entry for my existing linux changing a few settings and re running lilo?

Is it something like Tom's Root Boot?

Bootable means it contains a linux image. Mountable as root means it contains the / directories and a fair amount of the files underneath.
I vote for Toms: http://www.toms.net/rb/ - boot from floppy, remove, put in your diskette and mount it

This rescue CD claims to boot various floppy images.
It sounds interesting. I have not got it working yet, myself..
It may point the way to boot from your hard drive if you still wish.
Good Luck.

i dont know what tom's Root Boot is like, but basically it is a bookdisk with a root file system on, i created it using the bookdisk-howto on tldp

basically it boots gives a root FS that contains a few utils that are needed to check over harddisks, create new partitions, etc

as i do a fare bit of drive imaging i was wondering if i could include this disk image on my main hardrive so as when i do drive imageing i can down my machine plugg the drive to be imaged in start it up using this disk image, and use dd to transfer the existing saved image to the disk and down the system again all with in a matter of minutes

basically the machine it will be going on looks after drive images as backups for several machines that are used for a viraty of tasks and as they need to be the same again and again every monday morning
rarther than boot from a floppy every time to do this which is slow i would like to transfer it to the hdd so it boots faster + i dont want to be up-ing and down-ing the main distro on there as it takes ages to load

so, would it be a case of using dd to transfer the disk image over or should i just copy the files over ( e.g. rootfs.gz, boo.gz ) then add an entry to lilo ?

As long as you edit lilo.conf and then re-run lilo, it should work as you're planning.

reinvention is a path to learning, but if you don't try Tom's you are missing amazing software