I was reading my email yesterday and I saw a review of Knoppix hacks. One of the hacks was the Poor Man’s Installation of Knoppix. I decided to give it a try. With a little more research I found a little more detailed version of the hack that was titled, Poor Man’s installation. Now my situation is slightly complicated due to an old CD-ROM that is used for booting. I have a much newer DVD/CD-RW writer but it is not used for booting. A couple of months ago I found out that my old CD-ROM drive locks up the Knoppix boot process when DMA gets enabled and boot process tries to access it. Knoppix automagically enables DMA on it so I had to use a cheatcode to disable the DMA. This was an unsatisfactory solution since it disabled DMA on all drives and this resulted in quite a performance hit. The other problem is that the CD-ROM does not like all CD-RW disks. My Ubuntu disk worked. My Knoppix 3.7 did not work.
By accident I left the Knoppix 3.7 CD-RW in the CD-RW reader and the CDR version of Knoppix 3.6 in the CD-ROM reader. When I booted and something interesting happened. It booted from the CDR(Knoppix 3.6) and then mounted Knoppix 3.7 on the CD-RW since it found it first. My CD-RW likes DMA so instead of locking up it proceeded to continue with the boot process off of the CD-RW(Knoppix 3.7). This worked because I was booting using the 2.4 kernel. It kind of worked with the 2.6 kernel but there were problems. After storing a Knoppix image(2.4) on /dev/hda1 I found that I could boot without specifying a “fromhd=” cheatcode! In fact I recommend this. In my setup Knoppix scans my hardrives first so the boot delay is pretty minimal. If you specify the wrong location it will dump you down into a restricted kernel and stop the boot process. Now the kernel used to boot with and the kernel image on the disk must use the same Linux kernel version for this to work.
Okay, one problem was solved. The next problem was creating a CDR version of the boot disk for my funky CD-ROM reader. For some reason I created a bad CDR version using CD Creator under XP. So I went into Knoppix and created a CDR version there. To give it the best chance at working, I restricted the write speed down to 4x and told it to verify. It took a long time to copy and verify but it works. Now I can boot the 2.6 kernel cleanly from the CDR. So now I am in the process of going back and re-creating the persistent home and a kernel 2.6 image.
The main reason I am going through this process is so that I can use Ethereal, Nessus, and QTparted in Linux. I still have this desire to see which ports are used by America’s Army and which ports are getting through my ISA firewall. Sometime in the future I will probably check out Linux virus checking. I actually learned some useful information about burning and reading CDR disks. If I can boot it using my funky CDR reader, I suspect the CD is bootable on most PCs.