Hi, Thanks a lot for your exceptional work.... I guess many people dealing with bootable CD's just could'nt do anything without isolinux... However I've got a small problem. In fact the problem is maybe due to my BIOS (Phoenix on an HP Vectra VL800), and maybe due to isolinux / memdisk, I don't know. Generally speaking, take any floppy, format it under Win2K, copy from your hard drive boot.ini, ntldr and ntdtect.com and you've goot a bootable floppy, which allows you to start win 2K. This works perfectly. Now if I make an image of such a floppy (is winimage ok ?) and try to make a bootable CD using memdisk.... it loads the image and then suddenly reboot the whole PC.... I tried to do the same thing another way, creating my bootable floppy image with another tool, following these instructions : http://www.cenatek.com/product_ramdisk.cfm?Page=FAQ_NT#How%20do%20I%20create %20a%20bootable%20disk The result is a little bit different, after loading the image, it says "booting" and the systems hangs.... but is still does not work. So is there a reason for memdisk not to work with the NT boot ? If you've already done the same thinkg then it's probably a problem with my BIOS (it works perfectly with DOS floppy images nevertheless) However, if you need to check somthing, I can send you an ISO image of my CD (not bigger than 2 MB). Best regards, and many thanks for your help. David.
Couple of questions: Question 1 -------------- I am using isolinux to create bootable CDs. I am having the following problems with boot time arguments. In my isolinux.cfg I have a section like label prep kernel gmklinux append root=/dev/ram0 initrd=rootfs.img image=fdisk mountcd=no \ network=dhcp logfile=/dev/tty4 utils=utils baseurl=http://sysconf/gui If I type "prep mountcd=yes" at the boot prompt. The boot time arguments I supply does not seem to take effect. Once I boot into the kernel, inspection of /proc/1/environ reveals "mountcd=no". I am not using any global appends. On the other hand, if I type "gmklinux root=/dev/ram0 ... mountcd=no ... mountcd=yes..." on the command line and once I boot into the kernel, /proc/1/environ has both the mountcd options, but the second one overrides the first (echo $mountcd returns yes). Is this a bug in isolinux? Question 2 -------------- This is more of a confirmation of what I understood from the documentation regarding appends Suppose an isolinux.cfg file has the following in it append GLOBALOPTS label opt1 kernel k1 append LOPT1 label opt2 kernel k2 append - append LOPT2 Then if I type "opt1 ABC", then the actual command line passed to k1 is "GLOBALOPTS LOPT1 ABC" and if I type "opt2 DEF" then the actual command line passed to k2 is "LOPT2 DEF". right? - Murali
H. Peter Anvin wrote:> ganapathy murali krishnan wrote: > >> In all cases /proc/cmdline contains the following >> >> <vkernelopts> BOOT_IMAGE=<kernelname> <boottimeoptions> >> >> where <vkernelopts> is the append line in the appropriate label section, >> <kernelname> is the kernel in the appropriate label section, and >> <boottimeoptions> is whatever I typed in at boot time. >> >> Depending on the length of the <vkernelopts> they may/may not show up in >> /proc/1/environ. For now, I can read that information off >> /proc/cmdline and create >> the appropriate environment variables myself. >> > > Wow. That sounds like a kernel bug to me. >This is a kernel which I compiled using make menuconfig.... Could a wrong choice there have caused this or is this deeper than that. - Murali