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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!newsfeed.nacamar.de!news1.best.com!nntp2.ba.best.com!not-for-mail From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@FreeBSD.org> Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: Creating a boot floppy Date: Mon, 07 Jul 1997 21:55:12 -0700 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 30 Message-ID: <33C1C830.3F54BC7E@FreeBSD.org> References: <ECzA5C.L9t@nonexistent.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: time.cdrom.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (X11; I; FreeBSD 2.2-STABLE i386) To: Test <jim@carroll.com> Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:44081 [posted and emailed] Jim wrote: > > I am trying to create a boot floppy for a FreeBSD 2.2.1 system, but am > having alot of trouble. My basic problem boils down into not knowing > what to include on the floppy to boot a "minimal" system. Well, you're missing /bin/sh for one thing - how is system supposed to come up single user? Also, single user is *all* you can do with no startup scripts in /etc. In any case, this really isn't the way to get to where you're going since you'll quickly find that the kernel and a couple of utilities are all you're able to fit, and this falls far short of a truly usable boot floppy. The installation boot floppy contains just a gzip'd kernel with an MFS filesystem (also compressed) compiled into it. The kernel decompresses itself and the MFS image and then copies the MFS image into memory as the root fs. The contents of the MFS image are, in turn, "crunched" to achieve even more space savings. In other words, the tricks we had to pull to get a truly usable boot floppy were insane and you should now give up if you're not willing to do similar things. ;-) Read /usr/src/release/Makefile to see just what I'm talking about here. -- - Jordan Hubbard FreeBSD core team / Walnut Creek CDROM.