Ok I have an oddball question. I'm still fairly new with linux so any advice is much appreciated. Here's my situation. I have an IBM thinkpad that's about 4 years old, the hard drive died out. Well is broken actually and those fools at IBM wanted like $400 for a 5 gig. Ya, right. Anyways, I found a version of linux that's on a CD and run staight from the CD and memory, so no hard drive required. So I can start putting my laptop to some use again. Well the problem is that the CD is bootable, and for some unknown reason none of the laptop will not boot from the CD, keeps looking for a disk. So what I need is a bootable floppy that once ran, will boot and then point the computer to the CD's startup program. I dont really know anything about scripting for Linux, or what programs do what, anyone have any advice? I do have a bootable floppy for emergencies that I can load and mount the CD, but how do I start the CD from there? Thanks

First: Have you tried going into the BIOS and changing the boot order from floppy first to cdrom first?

If your bios doesn't support a bootable cdrom, then you will need to have the kernel on a floppy and there is a couple of options

put the kernel on there at the beginning of the drive so it will boot

you would do that with dd

dd if=kernel of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k

next you will set the kernels root device with rdev

rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/hd?

where ever the cdrom is

when the kernel loads it will expect the root device on /dev/hd?

it will look on /dev/hd? for /bin/init

which will look for /etc/inittab and run /bin/login



The other option and maybe the best, would be to install lilo on the floppy you run lilo with the cdrom in and it should let you know if it has a problem with your lilo.conf or finding the floppy

check this out, just remember that the difference here is that it's not /dev/fd0 but /dev/hd?

http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Bootdisk-HOWTO/

Well in response to the first reply, yes, the bios is set to boot from the cd first, it's just not, ibm hardware go figure.

As for the second response. That's a lot to take in, heh, I'll have to fiddle around a bit, I'll hollar if I get lost. Less someone can convert that too noob.

Ug, does anyone have a step by step on how to make this boot disk. I think I've been at this too long, 13 hours, no caffeine. Heh, anyways I've been reading and comparing to the generic boot disk I have, which is rather difficult since it's compressed on the disk.

There must be a bootloader out there that can fit on a disk that you can tell it where too look. Hmm, Any advice? heh Thanks.

Ok after some caffeine did a bit of thinking. I could modify the existing boot disk I have, so that instead of loading the kernel from the floppy, it would load the kernel from the CDROM. Which brings up a couple questions, first off the kernel IS the first thing loaded correct? Secondly, most likely the CD would have to be mounted prior to it loading the kernel but that doesn't sound quite right if the kernel is first.

Someone let me know if I am Waaaay off track here.

My next issue is how do I edit the files. Still somewhat new to linux the only text editor I could locate so far was the VI command.

Last question of course is what's the filename of the first file loaded, looking at the floppy (ls -a) here is what shows on the disk.

boot.b map settings.s bz2bzImage rc.custom.gz

Which one of these says ok unpack this file and go from there.

Thanks for the advice

I would use the kernel on the floppy and use lilo on the floppy.

That way all you need to do to change kernels later on is to make another floppy.

However, since you say your bios supports booting a cdrom I think your cdrom is not made correctly if you have other cds that will boot.

check the live cdrom howto

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue54/nielsen.html

Well I have tried some things to no avail. Can someone spell out just how to do this? Need a floppy to boot from, that turns around and tells the computer to boot from the CD, nothing more. The CD I have will boot (tested on other computers) just this one will not boot to it, good old ibm hardware. Anyways, someone said put the kernal and lilo on the disk and edit something or another, ug. The point of getting this CD to work is so I can learn more about linux and put some use to this laptop. Help! Thanks

what was the result of the attempt you made. If you can post something we can see where you went wrong.

Is the disk booting, errors, etc...

here is the easy way
I will call your kernel bzImage your floppy fd0 and your cdrom hdc

adjust these to match what you have


dd if=bzImage of=/dev/fd0 bs=1k

rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/hdc

let us know how it turns out

Well I finally got it to work. Wasn't how anyone suggested but thanks to everyone who helped! Now I can actually start fiddeling more with it and learn more. Here's how I got it to work.

I used a regular win98 boot disk, loaded with CD rom support.

This I used Loadlin to start the CD up. Here's the Command in case anyone else has this problem.

loadlin e:\isolinux\vmlinuz initrd=e:\isolinux\initrd.gz init=/linuxrc prompt_ramdisk=0 rw root=/dev/ram0 vga=normal

my cdrom was E but you can change that to anything

Thanks again for all the support and hope this helps someone else.