multiboot cd

[Jason Munro]

Hello kclug,
   My name is Jason, I'm a net/sys admin in Lawrence and have been on the
list for a short time. I wanted to share with all of you a cool project I
have been pondering for a while and recently put a little time into that I
think others on this list might find useful. When starting at this job I
was not only responsible for our linux servers but also the primary user
support person and pc tech. As many of you know the normal rotation of pcs
through the user base requires repeated installs of your core software. Its
handy to burn a cd with all the usual install files, drivers, cabs, etc.
Going a step further it's not to hard to copy a bootable floppy image in
with the files and make the cd bootable for rescue purposes. So we used to
have two flavors, a dos bootable cd and a tom's root & boot version. I
always thought it would be cool to create a cd that could boot into
different useful OS images and recently found a way to do it. Here is how.

The best resource I found explaining many of the details on how to pull
this off is at the "Timo's rescue Cd Set" sourceforge project:

http://rescuecd.sourceforge.net/288.html#syslinux

There is a link under section 2.1 where you can download the basic file
structure for setting up your cd. The bootable images can be made using the
instructions on that page if you are building your own linux rescue os but
its quite easy to simply dd a bootable floppy into its image:

dd if=/dev/fd0 of=dos.img

See the dd man page for more on that. After a couple hours collecting  cool
floppy images I realized that while linux rescue systems are handy, they
are also quite restricted due to the size restraints (limited shell,
limited commands, simplistic editor, limited hardware support, etc.). While
the images booted with memdisk in this setup are restricted to various
sizes the default operating system is not, so I replaced it with a custom
linux rescue os that runs in a 12MB ramdisk with a 2.4.20 kernel with
support for a load of hardware, full featured version of bash, vim, ssh,
lynks, cfdisk, etc. Because any of the images that boot can then access the
cd (if they contain cdrom support), more commands can be stored on the cd
outside the ramdisk to keep things from getting out of hand, or to setup a
dos program that can be run after booting up (the dos version of partition
magic from the rescue floppies works like a charm).

The final result of my efforts is 30MB (plenty of room left for our install
files), and boots 10 different images:

My custom linus os, toms root & boot, win98se dos (with partition magic),
minuetOS ( a super cool 32bit assembly os), 4 bootable disk utils, and 2
bootable memory utils.

Anyway, just wanted to share, hope someone finds it useful.
 

 __ Jason Munro
  ___ sailfrog at users.sourceforge.net
   ____ http://hastymail.sourceforge.net/