Syslinux - Oct 2002 - root device

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Hi,

I created a bootable linux cd and always had to enter the root device (cd
drive) as kernel parameter at the syslinux prompt. (i.e. linux root=/dev/hdc)
I could not set a fixed root device as this cd should be bootable on other
systems with cd drive as /dev/hdd or something different, too.
So my question is, is there a way of letting syslinux setting this root device
or can linux set it's root device to it's boot device?

thx, Dan

- --
- ----------------------------------------------------------------------
%> ln -s /dev/null /dev/brain
%> ln -s /dev/urandom /dev/world
%> dd if=/dev/world of=/dev/brain
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Dan Osterrath wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I created a bootable linux cd and always had to enter the root device (cd
> drive) as kernel parameter at the syslinux prompt. (i.e. linux
root=/dev/hdc)
> I could not set a fixed root device as this cd should be bootable on other
> systems with cd drive as /dev/hdd or something different, too.
> So my question is, is there a way of letting syslinux setting this root
device
> or can linux set it's root device to it's boot device?
> 
No, there isn't, and there can't easily be, unfortunately, since there 
is reasonable no way to correlate what device the BIOS used with what 
Linux would call it.

However, there are two ways to deal with this problem:

a) Use the ide-scsi driver and specify the root device as /dev/sr0... 
since both IDE and SCSI CD-ROMs will be treated as SCSI, it should be 
/dev/sr0.

b) Use an initrd and search for a known file or label on the CD-ROM. 
This is the method I used on the SuperRescue CD-ROM.

	-hpa