[RULE] Boot-floppy detect.

[Michael Fratoni]

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On Friday 24 January 2003 07:17 pm, Martin Stricker wrote:

> Remember that you can format a high-quality floppy for 1.7 MB (the
> theoretical limit is 2.88 MB IIRC). Some mini-distros like mulinux [1]
> use this trick to stuff more material onto the floppy. The dd command
> to write the bigger image will just have a bigger bs:
> dd if=slinky-detect.img of=/dev/fd0 bs=17k

If I remember correctly, you use a device other than /dev/fd0 for this 
trick. (It may be possible using fd0, though) Using /dev/fd0u1722 allows 
you to write out 1722k, I believe. I also seem to recall burning out a 
floppy drive by doing this.

Actually the detect binary size wasn't an issue, as it turned out. I used 
a compressed ramdisk to hold the filesystem image.

The root filesystem is 1.3M

$ du -ch filesys-detect/
1.3M    total

However it compresses nicely to 509k, leaving plenty of room for a kernel 
and files required by syslinux to boot. Here's the floppy info:

$ ls -sh -1 /mnt/floppy/
total 1.3M
 512 detect.msg
7.0K ldlinux.sys
509K rootfs.gz
 512 syslinux.cfg
730K vmlinuz

The root filesystem contains busybox compiled with a good number of 
utilities as well:

[mfratoni at paradox slinky]$ ls filesys-detect/bin/
ash      chown  df      gzip      mkdir  pidof  rmdir  tar     vi
busybox  cp     echo    hostname  mknod  ping   sed    touch   zcat
cat      cpio   false   kill      more   ps     sh     true
chgrp    date   grep    ln        mount  pwd    sleep  umount
chmod    dd     gunzip  ls        mv     rm     sync   uname

[mfratoni at paradox slinky]$ ls filesys-detect/sbin/
halt      init    lsmod   modprobe    reboot  route    swapon
ifconfig  insmod  mkswap  pivot_root  rmmod   swapoff

[mfratoni at paradox slinky]$ ls filesys-detect/usr/bin/
[      clear    du    free  killall  rpm2cpio  tee   uniq    which   yes
basename  cut      env   head  md5sum   sort      test  uptime  whoami
chvt      dirname  find  id    reset    tail      tty   wc      xargs

[mfratoni at paradox slinky]$ ls filesys-detect/usr/sbin/
chroot  detect  write_report.sh

- -- 
- -Michael

pgp key:  http://www.tuxfan.homeip.net:8080/gpgkey.txt
Red Hat Linux 7.{2,3}|8.0 in 8M of RAM: http://www.rule-project.org/
- --
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