Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

Quick summary - I can boot BL2 from RAMdisk, or BL3 from loop, or SW40 
zipslack, on my ASUS P5A-B, which other people have had trouble getting to 
boot with linux, but I cannot boot any version from hard drive.  Using 
loadlin.  (Did not try the BL3 lilo 2-floppy version.  I do not want to 
have to access DOS from dosemu, which for some reason will not access the 
keyboard characters A and S, at prompt or in programs).

DR-DOS, FreeDOS, Win95DOS do not work.
It gets stuck after something about NET4.0 and TCP.

Setting second drive to 'none' in CMOS did not help.

Once in RAMdisk bl2 I can mount /dev/hdb2 /hd and then
chroot /hd links2, or other programs on hard drive, without needing tp 
specify the new path to them.

I can thus run programs from hard drive but chroot is a nuisance
and it would be complicated to compile on such a system.

I tried to
mount /dev/hdb2 /
but it told me that /dev/ram0 is already mounted on /

Is there some way to boot with RAMdisk BL2 and then switch over to
the HD by replacing /dev/ram0 with /dev/hdb2?  Same kernel.

Can chroot be somehow set up to work with every command instead of 
specifying it before each command?

Can this be automated in an rc file?

Other ideas?  I could not understand how rdev works but I think it is just 
to specify where to find the kernel during boot.  I have no trouble 
booting the kernel, it is the file system that is not recognized here.


Another solution to my problem of getting computers to boot linux is to 
put Win98 DOS on the other computer (won't always boot linux unless it 
first boots with Win9X DOS) but since it is formatted with DR-DOS Win98 
DOS will not recognize the C: drive.  I could always boot with a floppy 
disk DR-DOS to defrag since all partitions are 16-bit.  Can one reformat a 
DOS drive from DR-DOS to some other DOS without losing what is on it?
I suppose I could copy all the files to the linux partition, reformat, and 
then copy them back.

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org