🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <33310521.87639@news.cuug.ab.ca>, lok@cuug.ab.ca says...
>
>Hi,
>
>        I sucessfully installed Red Hat Linux on my system, but LILO was not
>installed since my primary Windoze95 partition contains a 32 bit FAT.  
Therefore
>LILO could not even touch the master boot record let alone installing itself.
>My workaround for this is everytime I want to boot to linux, I'd insert the
>bootdisk in my floppy drive and specify "linux root=/dev/hda3" (hda3 being 
the
>primary linux native partition) at the "Boot:" prompt.  I was wondering if 
there
>is a speedier way than this since it's takes a while to boot from a floppy.  
Is
>there another way to boot to Linux that can minimize floppy read (maybe 
setting
>up a customized boot-floppy pointing to a image file that resides on hda3)?  
Any
>ideas?
>

Well there are a couple of approaches here.  In /boot there should be the 
actual kernel (vmlinuz, about 400K - 500K) that RedHat installed for you. 

1> It's possible to copy that kernel to a disk and just boot directly (no 
LILO).  You must rdev vmlinuz /dev/hda3 (to set your root partition) and   
rdev -R vmlinuz 1 (to make it read-only) then just cp vmlinuz /dev/fd0 to a 
formatted floppy.  (Of course, to be paranoid safe, do this to a COPY of 
vmlinuz :-) This isn't a real fast boot (floppies aren't very fast :-(, but 
it's quicker than waiting for LILO and typing parameters.

2> You can copy vmlinuz and the 'loadlin' package (usually loadlin-????.zip) 
to a DOS partition and use loadlin to start Linux from an MSDOS prompt (not a 
DOS window - you must shutdown Win95 to a DOS prompt).  Read the loadlin docs 
for info - it's reasonably painless.

geoff