Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 18:58:03 -0800 (PST) From: Dan Strick <strick@covad.net> To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Cc: peterjeremy@optushome.com.au Subject: Re: Bootonly CDROM utilities Message-ID: <200402290258.i1T2w3K2000526@mist.nodomain>
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On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 10:52:57AM -0800, Dan Strick wrote: >> > Why not make the live file system CD (i.e. ...disc2.iso, the fixit CD) > bootable? It could serve both purposes. >> and on Sun, 29 Feb 2004 07:10:21 +1100, Peter Jeremy responded: >> > Last time I looked, it was. Have you tried booting disk2? >> I tried the 5.2-RELEASE disc2 shortly after 5.2-RELEASE came out and it would not boot. I just tried it again and it still doesn't boot, at least not on my machine. The BIOS seems to ignore it, as if there was no bootstrap support on it. I verified the MD5 checksum after I first wrote that disk and it does have the live file system on it and the file /cdrom.inf says "CD_VERSION = 5.2-RELEASE". Then I tried the 5.2.1-RELEASE disc2 and the 5.1-RELEASE disc2 and both booted but they were extremely clumsy. If you boot them and go into fixit mode, the fsck command doesn't work because it can't find fsck_4.2bsd. (You have to invoke it with the full command name.) I vaguely recall lots of similar glitches the last time I tried to use a live-filesystem CD in fixit mode. I also just tried booting the 4.9-RELEASE disc2 and while it did boot it was was even more diffcult because it had neither devfs nor a copy of MAKEDEV in /dev. Perhaps you have to go into the sysinstall fdisk/disklabel menus to get the required special files created. I dunno... One other glitch: the memory file system mounted on / was only something like 4 MB and had less than 800 KB free. Perhaps it needs to be bootable on 8 MB machines, but such machines are rare these days. It would be nice if one could have a bigger memory file system on machines with more memory. Just a thought ... Dan Strick strick@covad.net
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