Next Previous Contents

4. The BOOT/ROOT disks

Two disks are provided to allow using partition image from floppy disks. The boot disk was created from a recent kernel. This kernel include the support of many file systems, as ext2fs, vfat, ntfs, and reiserfs. Then it allows to save/read image files on many file systems. The kernel also include many drivers, as the parallel ZIP drive, the SCSI, ... to allow using many medias to read/write the image file. The root disk was created from a slackware root disk. Data space is missing on the root disk, then some commands can be missing. We try to remove debug data from executable binary files with objcopy, and we compress the root disk with gzip -9, but all libraries and commands require many disk space.

4.1 Why theses disks ?

You may need these two floppies to use Partition Image in some cases:

4.2 How to create these disks ?

When you have downloaded the two files (boot disk image and root disk image), you will use them to create the floppies disks. You need two 1,44 MB floppies.

Under Linux:

Under DOS/Windows: You need to download RAWRITE.EXE, which wan be found on Partition Image home page.(14 KB)

4.3 How to use these disks ?

First, you must insert the boot disk, and power on your computer. Wait a few minutes. When you see the message "VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press ENTER", insert the root disk and press enter. Instructions will explain you what to do to continue.


Next Previous Contents