This is long, but definitely "on topic", so please read. You may have noticed that the newest computers don't have floppy drives. They boot from CD rom. Therefore, we need talking rescue CDs. Yes, there are some out there, but let's say we want to build our own, with our adapters, our utilities, etc. How can this be accomplished? I'm looking for advice/ideas. Here are the options as I see them. Some of these may not even be possible; I don't know. (A) Place your mini distribution, with adapter and utilities etc, into a ram disk or a loop-accessible file. Use lilo to replace the first 512 bytes, thus creating a boot disk that is also a Linux disk. Then burn this out to a CD. I know this works with floppies, but don't know about CDs. Can you make a bootable linux file system this way? Does the file system have to cover the entire CD, or can it be smaller? My system, that makes me happy, is 80 meg, so it's a shame to have to manipulate and burn all 670 megs. And, how do you set the root device, since some CDs are on hdc while others are on hdd. Guess wrong, and Linux doesn't come up at all. Also, some CD players require weird drivers that might not be on my distro. (B) put a bzImage at the base of the CD so LInux boots directly, no boot loaders involved. It then sucks in a large ramdisk. Maybe it's 30 or 40 meg. Today's computers can handle that. You've got all your utilities, everything you need, in memory. You don't have to keep the CD spinning, in fact you can take it out completely. Now mount your hard drives and go to work. Also, no need to copy and remount directories in tmpfs, like /tmp and /etc and /home, so they can be writable. Everything is writable, because it's all in memory, and no longer on CD. And I don't have to set the root device. I like this approach, but if you have an older computer with less then 64 meg, it's probably not going to work for you. That's the only down side I guess. Other than that, it's very simple and convenient. (C) A hybrid. Put bzImage at the base and suck in a modest initrd, just a few megs. It wakes up, looks around, figures out where the CD is, loads the necessary drivers, mounts the CD, say under /usr, and gives you access to the rest of the utilities that don't fit in memory. This is the most complicated of the three, but the most general and flexible. Is it possible, btw, to have a linux file system on a CD, that you can mount, that doesn't start at the beginning? It would have to start past the bzImage and past the initrd image - and I don't know if that can be done. And perhaps there are other ways to implement this that I haven't thought of. Please give me your ideas. If you can give a detailed procedure on how to make such a disk, that's even better; though you might want to mail that to me off line, eklhad@comcast.net, so as not to clog up this list too much. Thank you, Karl _______________________________________________ Blinux-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list