Re: Parted w/o boot disk

[Andrew Clausen]

Hi Dave,

Dave Waller wrote:
> 
> I want to install linux on my VAIO notbook and it is w/o a floppy or
> cdrom.

Interesting.
 
> What I need to do first is use parted to split the d: drive into a linux
> disk.  Which I know how to do.
> 
> I am having trouble now with the boot disk part.  What is type is the
> bootdisk, I have tried fat, vfat, minix, and ext2.  What I want to do is
> use loadlin from a command prompt to load the correct kernel and root
> image, which I want to get off the bootdisk.

Do you have another Linux machine handy?  You can separate the kernel
and ramdisk from the partboot.img file, with:

        # dd if=partboot.img of=kernel.img bs=1k count=MAGIC
        # dd if=partboot.img of=initrd.img bs=1k skip=MAGIC

MAGIC is a number, which is 575, if my calculations are correct.
If I'm wrong, you can find it by booting off partboot.img, and
it will say "found compressed ramdisk at block MAGIC".

Andrew Clausen