Hi folks. I'm new to this list, and pretty new to linux, although I
used to do a fair amount of work around unix many years ago, so I have a
grasp of some of the fundamentals.
I have a Dell Vostro 200 with no OS (well, freedos actually), and I want
to figure out how to get linux onto it. I currently only have windows
systems to work from. My plan was this: from windows, use syslinux on
a USB memory stick, copy memdisk and a debian-live image to it, and boot
memdisk to load the debian-live image as a ramdisk to then "really" boot
off of. However, it seems to not actually quite work. But almost.
When I turn on the machine, memdisk runs, creates the ramdisk, boots
from it, and then successfully brings up the debian-live boot screen. I
accept the default, and the boot process starts. But.
When using "debian-live-lenny-amd64-standard.img",
. lots of boot messages displayed .
"Begin: Mounting root file system ."
. few more messages
"Begin: Running /scripts/live-premount . done."
Then 40 repeats of:
"/init: line 1: cannot open /dev/scd0: No medium found"
and then:
"BOOT FAILED"
then some boilerplate stuff, then
"live-initramfs will now start a shell. The error message was:"
" Unable to find a medium containing a live file system"
Then it left me in BusyBox (took me a while to figure out what that
was!).
When I tried using "debian-live-etch-amd64-standard.img", the result was
very similar, except it didn't have the "no medium found" messages.
So,. is debian-live supported running from memdisk? Is there
something I can tweak to fix it? Or is it a non-starter?
(BTW, this is a bit of a learning project for me, so I don't mind taking
a few detours here and there. My next experiment is to run the regular
debian installer via memdisk.)
Thanks for any info!
Alex Dommasch
