Re: fallback and bootable CD?

[Niall Young]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Niall Young wrote:

> On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Yoshinori K. Okuji wrote:
>
> > At Wed, 13 Nov 2002 11:32:07 +0100,
> > Herbert Szumovski wrote:
> > > I thought CD's are not supported by Grub (neither for putting
> > > Grub on a bootable CD with iso filesystem nor for booting a CD
> > > in any way) ?
> >
> > That's right. That has been in TODO for years.
>
> There are posts in the archive suggesting that Grub can boot a CD
> if the BIOS supports it as a boot device?

Ok - I've finally got what I needed so if you're interested:

My aim is to have a bootable CD that can be left in the drive
permanently.  Kinda like Knoppix, but it does a HD install automatically
and you leave the CD in the drive after reboot.  The CD itself will store a
customised FAI (http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/) NFSROOT along with
the subset of Debian GNU/Linux packages that I require.  It's basically a
non-interactive installer for Debian - it installs the base system along
with any extra packages and customisations that you need as part of a
defined class.  PXE/DHCP isn't an option for me, hence leaving the CD
in the drive permanently as I don't have physical access to the machine.
Read-only media should help to keep the machine secure, instead of
relying on an upstream package repository that could have trojans.

So along comes a new machine, we plonk in a CD and when it boots it'll
try the HD first and if this fails it'll use Grub's fallback option to
boot the CD, perform a new installation, reboot and then succeed on the default
HD boot.  If you want to rebuild the machine from scratch, delete the kernel or
partition table and reboot - a new machine will be up in a few minutes
accepting connections.  Hopefully FAI and this boot mechanism can be
incorporated into the debian-installer so official Debian CDs can do
this out of the box one day.

You have to build an El Torito bootable CD with a HD image instead of
an iso9660 filesystem.  Thanks to Thierry and mkbimage, now onto FAI...

Niall Young                                    Chime Communications Pty Ltd
address@hidden                            Level 6, 263 Adelaide Terrace
Ph: 08 9213 1330 / 0408 192 797               Perth, Western Australia 6000

     "there's a lot of movement in my trousers at the moment"
                                     -- Dennis Kristofich, Sep 2002