On Wed, 29 May 96 16:13:26 PDT 
 greywolf@defender.VAS.viewlogic.com wrote:

 > Well, while we're at it, someone with a CD burner should figure out how to
 > make one bootable.  I'm going to guess that the major stumbling block on
 > doing this is NOT installing bootblocks but in making a memory-based root
 > filesystem for handling the installation of a miniroot; MFS would be a
 > good candidate for that, and a RWOD would be a good candidate for testing
 > bootable media:

See my previous message ... It's not even a VSMOP ... it's already been 
done; granted, not on a CD-ROM, but that's a detail :-)

 > 	- install boot blocks on CDROM
 > 	- install bare minimum FS on CDROM with embedded rc script which
 > 	  sets up a MFS and copies itself to the MFS (so some stuff can be
 > 	  modified)

It doesn't even have to do that... my approach when doing the hp300 
install stuff for 1.1 was to make /tmp an MFS ... Things that needed to 
be modified were handled by making the file a symlink to a "shadow" file 
that resided in /tmp, like:

	/etc/disktab -> /tmp/disktab.shadow
	/etc/fstab -> /tmp/fstab.shadow

...etc.  For things like disktab, for which a default is provided, the 
shadow file is copied into place when the install script runs.  For 
others, like fstab.shadow, those are created on the fly.  It seemed to 
work pretty well, is reasonably flexible, and simple to implement.

 > 	- modify the parameter files as necessary in order to install a
 > 	  miniroot
 > 	- continue on with miniroot, where a writable partition is not a
 > 	  problem.
 > 
 > I bet if someone could test this out on a optical RW disk first, we'd be
 > able to achieve bootable CDROM-ness.
 > 
 > 
 > 				--*greywolf;
 > --
 > "I am Buzz Lightyear, ->SPACE RANGER<-"
 > "You are a TOY!  T-O-Y: TOY!"

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Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
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