13200178 Hendra Tampang Allo wrote: > > Hi friends, i am sorry i am a newbie. I still don't understand what > image means.For example, what does boot image mean? In this case, it means an image of a filesystem. It is a file which contains the whole structure and files of a complete filesystem. On Unix-like operating systems (like Linux) you can look into it (and even change the content!) by mounting it onto the loopback device (notz to be confused with the loopback interface which is the computer's own network interface and always has the IP address 127.0.0.1). Look at "man mount" and search for the option -o loop. Filesystem images are mostly used for bootable media, because to be bootable the filesystem on the bootable media (floppy, harddisk, CD etc.) needs to have a bootloader in its master boot record (MBR). The MBR is a special place and cannot be written with normal methods (it is not accessible by normal programs). That means: If you make a copy of all files from a bootable floppy to a blank floppy, that copied floppy is *not* bootable - the MBR has not been copied (and even if the boot would fail, because the location of the files on the floppy are not identical - booting is quite complicated and difficult). So the easiest way to send bootable meadia is to create an image of the filesystem, because that is an *exact* copy of everything including the MBR, and everything stays at exactly the same place. Most commonly you will see floppy images and ISO images, the latter are either for CDs or DVDs (depending on the size). As a side note, every bootable CD and DVD contains a bootable floppy image, because for booting the CD/DVD drive acts like a floppy drive (that was easier to implement than to invent a new way of booting). So if you want to create a bootable CD, you need a bootable floppy image and tell your CD burning software about it (on Linux it is mkisofs -b option, and mkisofs creates an ISO image). To write a boot image onto a floppy, you can use dd on Linux or rawrite on Windows. To write an ISO image onto a CD or DVD you need to tell your burning software that you want to burn an image. You cannot write an image as a file to a medium, because it's not a file but a filesystem. I hope that helps and is not too complicated! Best regards, Martin Stricker -- Homepage: http://www.martin-stricker.de/ Linux Migration Project: http://www.linux-migration.org/ Red Hat Linux FedoraCore3 for low memory: http://www.rule-project.org/ Registered Linux user #210635: http://counter.li.org/ -- Shrike-list mailing list Shrike-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/shrike-list
