Bootonly CDROM utilities

[Dan Strick]

On Sat, Feb 28, 2004 at 10:52:57AM -0800, Dan Strick wrote:
>>
> Why not make the live file system CD (i.e. ...disc2.iso, the fixit CD)
> bootable?  It could serve both purposes.
>>

and on Sun, 29 Feb 2004 07:10:21 +1100, Peter Jeremy responded:
>>
> Last time I looked, it was.  Have you tried booting disk2?
>>

I tried the 5.2-RELEASE disc2 shortly after 5.2-RELEASE came out and
it would not boot.  I just tried it again and it still doesn't boot,
at least not on my machine.  The BIOS seems to ignore it, as if there
was no bootstrap support on it.  I verified the MD5 checksum after I
first wrote that disk and it does have the live file system on it
and the file /cdrom.inf says "CD_VERSION = 5.2-RELEASE".

Then I tried the 5.2.1-RELEASE disc2 and the 5.1-RELEASE disc2 and
both booted but they were extremely clumsy.  If you boot them and go
into fixit mode, the fsck command doesn't work because it can't find
fsck_4.2bsd.  (You have to invoke it with the full command name.)
I vaguely recall lots of similar glitches the last time I tried to
use a live-filesystem CD in fixit mode.

I also just tried booting the 4.9-RELEASE disc2 and while it did boot
it was was even more diffcult because it had neither devfs nor a
copy of MAKEDEV in /dev.  Perhaps you have to go into the sysinstall
fdisk/disklabel menus to get the required special files created.
I dunno...

One other glitch: the memory file system mounted on / was only something
like 4 MB and had less than 800 KB free.  Perhaps it needs to be bootable
on 8 MB machines, but such machines are rare these days.  It would be
nice if one could have a bigger memory file system on machines with more
memory.  Just a thought ...

Dan Strick
strick at covad.net