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

I am trying to set up BL3 on a 50MB partition on a zip disk, to be used 
with a parallel port zip drive and a boot disk (David Moberg's blppaz.gz 
uncompressed and copied with dd to a floppy disk) so that I can have a 
portable linux computer which is smaller than  laptop and can be used at 
friends' houses if they have a parallel port.  (I might also need to bring 
along an external modem - do all computers with parport now also have 
serial port?).

David's instructions were for how to make a 50MB empty .img file and copy 
the files from the 20MB .img file that is provided by the BL3 loop 
installation.

I eventually managed to copy the files, instead, from a 200MB ext2 
partition (where I had added icewm, abiword, links2, kermit, lynx 2.8.5, 
and glibc 2.2.5 - 2.1.3 would be adequate for lynx, but I want to be 
able to also add opera and xpdf precompiled).  I have about 40MB total 
files.  Opera could be added in about 12MB more if wanted but my zip disk 
is only 100MB and I also use it to move files between computers.  I should 
get another 100MB disk.

dd if=/dev/zero of=fs50.img bs=1024k count=50
This creates and empty file with 50 1024K blocks (50MB).

mke2fs fs50.img   puts a file system onto it

mount -o loop fs50.img /mnt    mounts the file system so you can use it

mount /dev/hdb1 /hd             mounts my BL3 ext2 hd partition

cp -a /hd/* /mnt                copies files from partition to .img file

umount /hd
umount /mnt

mount /dev/hda3 /hd             mounts DOS partition containing BL3
cp fs50.img /hd/baslin          copy new .img file to baslin directory

rename fs.img fs20.img
rename fs50.img fs.img

reboot and then boot the loop BL3 as usual.
I am online with this new 50MB loop file version.


Next I need to reboot with the zip drive turned on (or maybe I can just 
turn it on then chroot to BL2, which I have set up with scsi modules), 
insmod the modules needed by the scsi zip drive (I have not yet figured 
out how to use the parport drive - I think I just add ppa.o),

mkdir /zip

mount /dev/sda4 /zip    mount the zip drive
mkdir /zip/baslin       make a /baslin directory on the zip disk

cp fs50.img /zip/baslin/fs.img  copy the .img file to the zip drive
                                in /baslin

Then hook up the parport zip drive, turn it on, reboot with the
parport boot disk and it is supposed to load BL3 from zip disk.

I will report back if this does not work right.

I just tried the chroot approach and could not insmod the scsi card 
module so will reboot instead.