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SuperSlak - Linux On A SuperDisk
_EternaL_ writes: "What could be more fun then hitting the eject button on your floppy drive, and swapping out your root file system? You say you don't wanna partition your hard drive to play with Linux? That's no excuse, install to your superdisk! Now there's a solution for anyone interested in getting a feel for Linux that doesn't have the space or time to install Linux on a hard drive, but has a Superdisk drive! Folks out there might be interested in knowing that installation to an internal ls120 (ie: SuperDisk) is possible. It took a bit of work, but thanks to moomonk it's fairly easy. You might wanna check out the basic howto over at electricgod.net. If that's not working out for you, you can also try over at dokks.com!"
Been there, done that. If you have a reasonably recent MB and an IDE (or SCSI :-) ZIP disk you can install a "minimal" Debian system to a ZIP - and later boot from it.
Instant monster rescue disk!
It's even better than that, because a minimal Debian install is only 25 MB or so, so you can stuff the remaining 75 MB or so with almost anything you can imagine. You don't have enough disk space to rebuild the kernel, X11, or glibc, but you definitely have enough room to have a reasonably complete compiler set that will allow you to build/rebuild any reasonably sized program. That's a lot more than you can say about 1-3 floppy rescue disks!
I haven't played with the 250 MB ZIP drives (the ATAPI ones just came out), but I have put ATAPI ZIP drives into all of my systems (except the laptop) specifically because they have proven themselves so useful when things go horribly wrong. In fact, I've even swapped out the floppy drive for the ZIP drive in most of those systems!
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
moomonk here (eternal & dokks can vouch for that). I didn't have this ready for release when I just noticed the story on /.. Damn ;-) Well anywhoo... This is really three things. At color.gz: A replacement for Slackware's color.gz root disk that will install directly to an ATA floppy drive (could be Zip if you felt like it). I didn't get around to putting the support for creating swap files on the root device so you'll have to do that yourself. Besides that it works peachy. Linux works much better on an ext2 filesystem then UMSDOS on a superdisk. I had X running with Mozilla off a disk from this earlier last week. It's slick for having a quickie system. par-pf.i: Almost like Slackware's paride.i boot disk except that it actually works. The Slackware boot disk includes the driver for paride CD/IDE/ATA floppy/ATA disk/ATA generic and the combination of them all breaks the disk. This only loads the ATA floppy driver but is otherwise identical. suprdisk.txt: Some notes on installing several distributions directly to a SuperDisk. In general, Debian and Slackware can be coerced (and with color.gz Slack even likes it). Mandrake and Red Hat were plain broken and aren't worth bothering with. SuSe also worked nice but was too large to be useful. In general, the idea to tricking the installer is to mount the superdisk at the installation mount point and then get the installer to ignore any linux partitions. You can get Slackware to install using the default color.gz if you have a linux partition and just mount the disk at /mnt. The installer doesn't need to touch the linux partition, it just needs to see one. For debian mount the disk at /target, skip the install section, ignore the error and then continue. The most important bit wasn't done at all. H. Peter Anvin's SYSLINUX works really slick if you have a UMSDOS file system like ZipSlack. Just unzip ZipSlack to the floppy, unzip 120linux.zip to the floppy and then run the syslinux program on the disk. The zip includes all the required configuration files. Under linux this is syslinux -s /dev/hd? where ? is a-d for a=primary, master b=primary, slave c=secondary, master d=secondary. If you'd like to have a ext2 file system you should use lilo. Go ahead and use a generic lilo configuration file. Just be sure to include this additional bit: disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd The idea is to trick the boot loader to access the floppy device on boot. The linux kernel will get it right later so you'll set your root to something like /dev/hdc or the ilk. My lilo.conf looks like # LILO start prompt default=3 # because i like my configuration to boot nicely message=/boot/message.txt # it describes the images 1-4 compact image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda label=1 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb label=2 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc label=3 single-key read-only image=/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdd label=4 single-key read-only disk=/dev/hda bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdb bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdc bios=0x00 disk=/dev/hdd bios=0x00 #LILO end eternal may have mirred these files to electricgod.net but their home is on dokks.com
Remember ZipSlack? It was quite similar, but used a 100 MB Zip disk. It also usd the UMSDOS filesystem, and thus could simply be placed into a Windows/DOS directory and used from there.
This is still cool, though, because I have an LS-120 and not a Zip drive.
J
It may be closed, but at least it's affordable. The annoying thing about Zip disks is that they're unaccountably expensive. The drives themselves are coming in at a decent price, *finally*, since you can get a remanufactures ATAPI ZIP unit for $49.95 at CompUSA, but the disks are still way too expensive to be all that useful considering capacity of 100MB (the 250 MB drives and disks are both even more $$$).
I bought a parallel port unit a few years ago when I got my first computer, an ancient 486DX4/100 laptop. Aside from the 5-pack that came with it, I only ever bought 2 more disks--Fuji brand Zip 2-pack for $25. I finally got a real computer and added a CD burner, and the Zip unit sits atop my computer still, unused for at least a year and a half. The sad part is, until the last few months, Zip drives were still retailing for the same price I bought mine at a couple years ago, and disk prices have come down a bit but not much.
I'm really not a fan of Iomega: overpriced is their best descriptor. My friends with LS-120 SuperDisk drives actually use them a lot, what with much more affordable media and all, and the drives themselves have been at a great price for a while. Plus, they double as your floppy drive which is cool, saves space, and sounds better than a regular floppy drive (not quite as gratingly noisy with the seeks and transfers).
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
Another way of partitionlessly installing Linux that a few distros (Mandrake and Suse, maybe others) are offering now is to use a loopback filesystem. I've had ZipSlack on my HD for a little bit and have become entirely too fed up with UMSDOS. So, with a little tweaking of the setup scripts, I installed LoopSlack to a 1.2G file. Kent Robotti has put together a prepackaged LoopLinux that is essentially the same thing.
Loopback-Root-FS-mini-HOWT O
LoopLinux
The easiest distribution to futz around with for stuff like this.
And if anyone cares to know what I did (which is a bit of a different approach than Kent took) feel free to ask.
And yes, this is also essentially what BeOS Personal does.
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
But it might be useful if you need to be able to bring a Linux distro around with you. You can get a USB LS-120 drive for less than $150, and then you could plug that in to any PC with a USB port, given proper drivers for the PC and for Linux.
But 8 steps to get to (I presume) a command-line root prompt is too much for folks who want to try out the desktop. A better set-up for these folks would be something like the free BeOS download (BeOS Personal Edition), where it boots from a filesystem-in-a-file on you C:\ drive.
Another use for this would be for admins that want to switch their users over to Linux: if you've got low-end boxes without CD-ROM drives, or if you don't have a CD-Burner, or don't want to bother with a CD, just create a bootable SuperDisk and use that to fdisk and pull down the tools you need from the network. (Ok, so in most cases, a burned CD would be more useful. Oh well.)