Re: [Trinux-talk] Trinux on hard disk - Who has done it?

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Hi,

Firstly, I've been investigating ways to make a small distro, for home use, 
based on linux and have received help from the resources in this project, to 
that end thank you very much.

Secondly, I am posting the following loose documentation of my own clever 
way of getting trinux installed on a harddrive. This may help someone who, 
like me, wants to do this but didn't see any howtos. Sorry if it is not 
basic enough but if your doing this you probably have some linux background 
already. Since i am, right now,  in the middle of an intense job search I 
have little time to answer email regarding anything other than job related 
inquiries. Talk to the list, if i can i will reply.

I. What i use......
I use small compact flash drives that have ide adapter/connectors. If you 
use an old small ide harddrive you can probably apply some of this technique 
with desirable results.
Also, I have a usb-flashcard reader that enables linux to treat the drive as 
a storage device, appearing as a scsi drive.
If all you have is windows, get a copy of KNOPPIX or some other live 
filesystem linux that runs off the CD-ROM drive. I use knoppix for many 
systems and its very capable. If you have a linux system then make sure you 
have syslinux installed.
The version of Trinux i use is the pre-release ISO from 5Sept02. From it 
you'll be copying the /trinux directory, bzImage,isolinux.cfg, licesne and 
the initrd.gz files to the root directory of the CF device.

II. Prepare the drive
The hardrive has to be labeled and formatted with a fat file system, but not 
FAT32.

With the CF card in the usb card reader,  plug it into the usb port on the 
linux system, but don't mount it yet. Find out what device your system 
called it. On my machine dmesg reports something like this:
SCSI device sda: 128001 512-byte hdwr sectors (66 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: sda1

So, this output tells me the CF card is on /dev/sda1. Now, you can run 
#syslinux /dev/sda1 (Use whatever device dmesg reports) which will install 
the syslinux boot loader to the cf device. Remember, i told you not to mount 
the cf device earlier, that's why. Also, remember i mentioned that the file 
system can't be FAT32, syslinux doesn't support FAT32. Syslinux also has 
trouble with large harddrives, YMMV. Lastly, syslinux will need to be 
configured using a file called syslinux.cfg. Most show-stopping boot 
problems I've encountered are caused by the bios not auto-detecting the 
drive geometry properly. You may be required to fiddle with bios settings.

Now mount the cf device.
#mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/cf

then
#cd /mnt/cf

You'll need to copy the following parts of the trinux CDROM to the root 
directory of the CF.

# cp -R /somewhere/trinux /mnt/cf
# cp /somewhere/isolinux/bzImage /mnt/cf
# cp /somewhere/isolinux/initrd.gz /mnt/cf
# cp /somewhere/isolinux/license /mnt/cf
# cp /somewhere/isolinux/isolinux.cfg /mnt/syslinux.cfg
# sync

Now with just this much you might get the system booted, but it'd be 
severely crippled. In this condition trinux believes you booted from an ISO 
which you didn't. BOOTFS=ISO9660 is even reported. You need the trinux to 
report BOOTFS=VFAT. So you need to do something that sounds like voodoo but 
its really just a work around.

cd into the root of the harddrive
#cd /mnt/cf
Now simply create a file called loadlin.exe
# touch loadlin.exe --- sure you could download loadlin and place it there 
too but this works just as well because your not actually using loadlin. So, 
if you don't have DOS or OPEN-DOS or the such this will get you what you 
want.

Having this file there will let/fool the init script into thinking the 
system booted from where it actually did, a harddrive, and not a cd-rom 
drive. Since the init script looks for loadlin and finds it, it assumes that 
it booted off of a harddrive and will report BOOTFS=VFAT.

Well thats really it. I simply unmount the cf and plug it into the machine 
that has the CF-IDE adapter and power up. Such a machine has no cdrom or 
floppy. I had best luck when a second IDE device wasn't present.

RIck Philbrick
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From: Matthew Franz <mf...@ci...>
To: la...@eg...
CC: tri...@li...
Subject: Re: [Trinux-talk] Trinux on hard disk - Who has done it?
Date: Mon, 7 Jul 2003 11:35:24 -0500

On Mon, Jul 07, 2003 at 11:37:43AM -0400, la...@eg... wrote:
 > I would be interested to know if anyone out there has, or knows anyone 
who has
 > ever installed trinux on the hard drive of a PC.  I would like to know 
how they
 > did it and what utilities they needed.  Ive tried googling extensively 
but so
 > far I havent found anything but postings such as my own.  Which 
frustrates the
 > shit out of me... So if someone knows something I could really benifit 
from the
 > knowledge and experience.
 >

I've done it an IDE compact flash (same thing as a hard drive) by
installing FreeDOS or MS-DOS and booting via loadlin.

-mdf

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