Slick Booting (Part 1)

[Doug]

(sending in 2 parts because this is too big )

Regarding filesystems and reinstalls ...

 > I would if I had the disk space.  I currently have
 > a 1.5gb and a 700mb drive.

After doing way too many reinstalls ... and switching
filsystem formats etc ... I came up with a great way
to make it almost painless to reinstall and also to
fix the partitions, or reformat, without needing any
floppy drive or cdrom drive. Everything is done from
the hard drive. It works like this:

I put a small DOS partition on every machine now.
I think this is good to have because some things
just need DOS, for example many BIOS update programs.
But there is another reason. Slackware has a slick
thing called install.zip ... it's basically a root
file system that is the *same* as booting from the
slack floppies BUT it sits on a DOS partition. It
uses the UMSDOS file system, which overlays onto
a FAT (DOS) file system. Why have this? If any of
my normal partitions get screwed up, or if I want
to change from reiserfs to ext3 or xfs or jfs ...
I can just boot this root file system from hda1
and it doesn't touch the rest of my disk until
I execute commands. So I can repartition, or
reformat, copy stuff around, fix problems, or
whatever.

This is what I do now ... I set up a partition
scheme that looks like this ....

1) Small DOS partition. It serves multiple uses.
    First it boots DOS for whatever purpose.
    Second it runs the NT bootloader ... it can
    start windows 2000 or DOS ... third it has
    the UMSDOS slackware install root disks
    (see this readme) ...

    ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-9.0/rootdisks/install.zip.README

    I have to basically start with a clean disk,
    but once I have the above UMSDOS filesystem
    install, I include it in LILO ... so any time
    I can boot a busybox based "rescue" disk which
    is actually the slackware install root disk!
    If *anything* goes wrong with my slackware,
    I just boot that and then I can mount the
    other partitions and fix, reformat, whatever.

    This is how I did this: I mount a target drive
    as slave from a working system. I then use
    cfdisk on the target drive and create a small
    DOS partition, and partitions for windows and
    slackware. I move that target drive to be
    master and boot with a bootable DOS floppy.
    I do an FDISK /MBR on the new disk to clear
    out the master boot record and set up a new
    DOS master boot record. I reboot to make sure
    DOS is bootable. At that point the system
    will boot directly into DOS.

2) Then I attach a CD-ROM drive and install the
    slackware, making sure I include the DOS
    partition in the LILO configuration. After I
    am done installing slack, I copy that
    install.zip to the DOS partition and unzip
    it (from within linux). It creates a linux
    directory in the DOS partition. I then copy
    the kernel from the slackware root partition
    into that umsdos directory:

    cp /boot/vmlinuz /dos/linux

    Then I edit the lilo.conf and add this umsdos
    partition to my boot options like this:

    # this is the normal root file system
    image = /boot/vmlinuz
      root = /dev/hda5
      label = Slackware-Linux
      read-only

    # this is the dos/windows boot
    other = /dev/hda1
      label = DOS-Windows
      table = /dev/hda

    # this is the busybox/umsdos file system
    image = /dos/linux/vmlinuz
       root = /dev/hda1
       label = Busybox-Rescue
       read-write

    Note that this last item points to /dev/hda1
    which the first partition, and is a small
    DOS partition where I have unzipped that
    install.zip file from slackware. Also note
    that it's listed as "read-write" rather than
    the usual "read-only" because it's not an
    ext2 file system, it's UMSDOS overlayed on
    top of DOS.

3) After I have LILO booting both the normal
    slackware and the busybox/rescue from the
    DOS partition, I install windows. Windows
    2000 install the NT bootloader into the
    DOS partition automatically. When I select
    DOS/Windows from LILO it launched the NT
    bootloader, which in turn displays its
    own menu allowing me to boot either DOS
    or Windows ...

(continued on next message)

   -- Doug