Re: [Bug-parted] bootdisk problem

[Andrew Clausen]

"Clifton T. Sharp Jr." wrote:
> 
> ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/bootdisk/partboot.img boots fine from floppy, but
> tries and fails to invoke modprobe about eight times. modprobe is not
> found on the floppy filesystem. I saw no indication this might be expected
> and did not proceed beyond that point.

The problem probably is that your hardware isn't supported by the
Linux kernel I put on the boot image.

It's fairly complicated at the moment, to get more drivers, and access
drivers.

I've just written some instructions, for the documentation:
NOTE: the "trick" I mention only works for >= 1.3.x.  (i.e. NOT YET)

Unfortunately, the boot disk doesn't support a very wide range of
hardware.  If your hard disk isn't supported, then:
(1) Boot off the Parted boot disk.
(2) Insert another (formatted) floppy disk.  (Trick: you can format
the floppy with Parted, by doing
        "parted /dev/fd0 mklabel loopback mkpartfs primary ext2 0 1.440")
(3) Mount the floppy disk. ("mount -t ext2 /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy" or
"mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy")
(4) Copy /sbin/parted to the floppy.  ("cp /sbin/parted /mnt/floppy")
(5) Copy /lib/* to the floppy.  ("cp /lib/* /mnt/floppy)
(6) Unmount the floppy.  ("umount /mnt/floppy")
(7) Find a boot disk that DOES support your hard disk.  (Hint: try looking for 
rescue
disks from various distributions on big mirror sites)
(8) Boot off your rescue disk.  Mount the disk you copied Parted onto.
(9) Run Parted:
        # cd /mnt/floppy
        # LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./parted

Does that look as long and complicated to you as it does to me?  :-(

Andrew Clausen