[ale] booting knoppix image from NTFS filesystem (was College Linux tips, advice, cool stuff?)

[Byron A Jeff]

On Tue, Jul 06, 2004 at 12:00:14PM -0500, Preston Boyington wrote:
> Byron A Jeff wrote:
>>My class and I just finished a proof of concept transplant of a Knoppix CD 
>> image 
>>into a Windows NTFS filesystem. So it's possible now to download Knoppix 
>>unto 
>>an unmodified XP/Win2000 harddisk and boot it without ever making an actual 
>>CD.
> 
> Would you mind giving a bit more information on what you did/were doing to 
> make this happen?  I think it is interesting.

I still don't have a current writeup. But I'll happily brief you on the 
process. It's one of my student's semester projects this summer to finish the
package and write the documentation.

> 
> Is it something like CoLinux or are you using VMWare and the like?

Neither. Note that I said that it's a transplant into an NT FILESYSTEM. Windows
isn't running at all. NTFS is simply the container to house the files. This is
important because that means that Knoppix can be run off the hard disk
without having to repartition.

This process is still rough around the edges so you'll need some patience if
you want to experiment with it. You need 4 items to boot Knoppix:

1) Filesystem image. In our case you need the entire CD image.
2) Linux kernel. We using 2.6 because of the new NTFS driver.
3) Special initial ramdisk image that can work with NTFS.
4) GRUB bootloader enhanced to boot from NTFS.

We've packaged all 4 items here:

http://kahuna.clayton.edu/itsk2611/ntfsloop.zip

Note because of the CD image it's 700+ megs. If you alread have KNOPPIX 3.4
and something like Roxio to pull the image from CD, you can get the package
here that only has items 2,3, and 4:

http://kahuna.clayton.edu/itsk2611/ntfsloop-nocd.exe

Note that it's a broken self extracting ZIP file. You should be able to rename
it ntfsloop-nocd.zip and use WinZip to unbundle it.

Note that because of NTFS issues under Linux you'll have to do all of this
under a native Windows OS. The instructions for setting up W32GRUB is here:

http://www.skyjammer.com/files/knoppix

Do not use the minintfs.gz ramdisk image listed. Use the one that's in the
above ntfsloop packages.

You'll need to do some editing at this point. You need to edit the
C:\BOOT.INI file as specified on the skyjammer page. Note that an extra
directory /ntfsboot has been added to the specified path. Also you need to
run w32grub with some options. However I don't have a windows box handy to
run the command.  Run w32grub with /help and it'll give you the options to
specify the menu file and the stage directory.

Like I said it's a little rough right now.

If you've gotten to this point then you should be able to boot Knoppix from
the HD without the CD at all.

Let me know if you have any questions.

BAJ