fawcett+BH@croftj.net
Copyright © 1995,1996,1997,1998,1999,2000 by Tom Fawcett and Graham Chapman.
v4.0, April 2000
This document describes how to design and build your own boot/root diskettes for Linux. These disks can be used as rescue disks or to test new system components. You should be reasonably familiar with system administration tasks before attempting to build your own bootdisk. If you just want a rescue disk to have for emergencies, see Appendix A.1.
Important: This document may be outdated. If the date on the title page is more than six months ago, please check the Bootdisk-HOWTO homepage to see if a more recent version exists.
Although this document should be legible in its text form, it looks much better in Postscript, PDF or HTML forms because of the typographical conventions used.
Graham Chapman wrote the original Bootdisk-HOWTO and he supported it through version 3.1. Tom Fawcett started as co-author around the time kernel v2 was introduced. He is the document's current maintainer.
This information is intended for Linux on the Intel platform. Much of this information may be applicable to Linux on other processors, but we have no first-hand experience or information about this. If you have experience with bootdisks on other platforms, please contact us.
Any volunteers?
Describe (or link to another document that describes) how to create other bootable disk-like things, such as CDROMs, ZIP disks and LS110 disks.
Describe how to deal with the huge libc.so shared libraries. The options are basically to get older, smaller libraries or to cut down existing libraries.
Re-analyze distribution bootdisks and update the "How the Pros do it" section.
Delete section that describes how to upgrade existing distribution bootdisks. This is usually more trouble than it's worth.
Rewrite/streamline the Troubleshooting section.
I welcome any feedback, good or bad, on the content of this document. I/we have done our best to ensure that the instructions and information herein are accurate and reliable. Please let me know if you find errors or omissions. When writing, please indicate the version number of the document you're referencing.
We thank the many people who assisted with corrections and suggestions. Their contributions have made it far better than we could ever have done alone.
Send comments, corrections and questions to the author at the email address above. I don't mind trying to answer questions, but if you have a specific question about why your bootdisk doesn't work, please read the section called Troubleshooting, or The Agony of Defeat first.
Copyright © 1995,1996,1997,1998,1999,2000 by Tom Fawcett and Graham Chapman. This document may be distributed under the terms set forth in the Linux Documentation Project License. Please contact the authors if you are unable to get the license.
This is free documentation. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
| Next | ||
| Introduction |