gmane.linux.openwall.user

Installing without a boot device?

Hi,

Has anyone tried to install from a CD image without a bootable CD drive or floppy?
I removed my floppy and due some quirk in the motherboard my CD won't boot 
I guess I will find out anyway, this is just in the hope to save me some work, soooo lazy...

Best,

JLD

--

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail owl-users-unsubscribe <at> lists.openwall.com and reply
to the automated confirmation request that will be sent to you.

headers

gremlin | 17 Aug 15:35

Re: Installing without a boot device?

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 03:27:07PM +0200, Jean-Luc Delatre wrote:

 > Has anyone tried to install from a CD image without a bootable CD
 > drive or floppy? I removed my floppy and due some quirk in the
 > motherboard my CD won't boot  I guess I will find out anyway,
 > this is just in the hope to save me some work, soooo lazy...

Hmmm... Is the BIOS on your MB capable of booting from USB?
Or, as another option: can you attach your HDD to another machine?

-- 
Alexey V. Vissarionov aka Gremlin from Kremlin
<gremlin ПРИ gremlin ТЧК ru>

--

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail owl-users-unsubscribe <at> lists.openwall.com and reply
to the automated confirmation request that will be sent to you.

headers

Jean-Luc Delatre | 17 Aug 15:49

Re: Installing without a boot device?

On Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:35:17 +0400
gremlin <at> gremlin.ru wrote:

> Hmmm... Is the BIOS on your MB capable of booting from USB?

That's not the kind of hack I have in mind, I rather plan to mount the CD image on a loop device, find out the
install scripts and hack them to run the install from the mounted image into a free partition.

> Or, as another option: can you attach your HDD to another machine?

I could, but I had nasty surprises doing that with a Knoppix DVD.
It took quite a bit of work to fix the misconfigured devices and modules from the installation machine when
the disk was moved to the running machine.

JLD

--

-- 
To unsubscribe, e-mail owl-users-unsubscribe <at> lists.openwall.com and reply
to the automated confirmation request that will be sent to you.

headers

Jean-Luc Delatre | 19 Aug 22:27

Re: Installing without a boot device?

Le Fri, 17 Aug 2007 15:49:17 +0200,
Jean-Luc Delatre (Kevembuangga) <jld <at> club-internet.fr> a écrit :

> That's not the kind of hack I have in mind, I rather plan to mount the CD image on a loop device, find out the
install scripts and hack them to run the install from the mounted image into a free partition.

Responding to my own question, in case anyone else has this silly problem:

# don't even need to burn a CD
mount -t iso9660 -o ro,loop /opt/owl/Owl-current-20070601-i386.iso /mnt

# locate the proper inittab
find  /mnt -type f -name inittab
/mnt/rom/etc/inittab
/mnt/rom/world/native/Owl/packages/owl-startup/inittab

# find out about the bootscript
grep ":sysinit:" /mnt/rom/etc/inittab |cut -f 4 -d ':'
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

# run the bootscript
chroot /mnt /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit

# check what the root shell is
grep "^root:" /mnt/rom/etc/passwd |cut -f 7 -d ':'
/bin/bash

# enter the Owl universe
exec chroot /mnt /bin/bash

(Continue reading)