[slackintosh-users] Re: Using loop devices
- From: "Marco Bonetti" <marco.bonetti@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: slackintosh-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:31:30 +0200
On 6/19/07, Mark Glassberg <vzeeaxwl@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have no experience with lilo and only a little with grub. Also, I
never used the windows nt file system. Most of my experience is with
loadlin, much of it with loop devices on single hard disk systems, in
order to avoid possible repartitioning problems. So, when I realized
that open firmware can read msdos disks, I wondered if a loop device
based slackintosh was possible.
ok, dos disk can be read both by osx, linux and windows.
the main problem in "loop booting" powerpc linux off a file is that
yaboot needs a special 512K boot partion. people who are afraid of
ruining their main osx installation often create it on an external mac
formatted firewire drive and install linux on it, see:
http://hansmi.ch/articles/boot-linux-from-firewire
this solution will save your main disk but will stop you from easily
sharing the device, as it's mac formatted and dos/windows may have
trouble accessing it.
at this point, the only solution is booting off a minimalistic livecd
which mounts the external drive, mount the loop image and pivot the
root into it. it will be only a couple of MB but you've to create it
from scratch (you can take a look at slax and linux-live rc scripts).
with this solution you can save your disks partitions (as cd booting
is directly handled by open firmware) and still be able to access your
disks from any os (as you're no longer required to mac-format it)
happy hacking ;-)
--
Marco Bonetti
Slackintosh Linux Project Developer: http://www.slackintosh.org
Linux-live for powerpc: http://www.slackintosh.org/pub/rsync/mb/linux-live
My webstuff: http://sidbox.homelinux.org
My GnuPG key id: 0x86A91047
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