'Evening All,
I have been trying to create a new one floppy distribution with mixed
success.
The disk is intended as a learning tool rather than as a normal rescue
disk.
Some proposed features are:
1) A real login so that the difference between being a normal user and
"root" can be demonstrated.
2) Two different methods of booting the disk. (Directly from power up if
the BIOS has been set to permit booting from the floppy or from DOS
otherwise)

So far I have made two working boot disks, one 1440k (80 tracks of 18
sectors) and the other 1722k (82 tracks of 21 sectors). Both have a dos
FAT12 filesystem and the syslinux boot loader. Both contain the same
files:
ldlinux.sys  --- the syslinux executable
syslinux.cfg --- the syslinux configuration file
syslinux.dpy --- a small welcome message
loadlin.exe  --- the loadlin-1.6 executable
linux.bat    --- a batch file to call loadlin.exe
root.gz      --- a compressed minix filesystem
zlinux       --- a compressed kernel

The syslinux.cfg file contains two lines:
DEFAULT zimage root=/dev/ram0 initrd=root.gz
DISPLAY syslinux.dpy

and the linux.bat file contains just
loadlin zimage root=/dev/ram0 rw initrd=root.gz

The root filesystem on these disks is from an old slackware system where
it was named rescue.gz and the compressed kernel is a 2.0.34 taken from
a New Zealand distribution called Basic Linux.

The next stage of the project is to replace the root filesystem with a
new one built from the latest version of busybox (0.51) and tinylogin
using libc5.  The kernel is to be replaced with 2.0.39 from tomsrtbt.

Here is where I have run into trouble.  After unpacking tomsrtbt.raw, I
copy the kernel zImage to my disk renaming it to zimage to replace the
2.0.34 kernel.  When I try to boot from the new disk the system hangs
after displaying
VFS:Mounted root (minix filesystem)
_

If I stick with the old kernel and change the root filesystem to my new
one I get a similar failure.  In an attempt to check the new filesystem
I have tried to chroot to it without success. The tree descends from
/home/ken/kenslin/ and the shell is the busybox shell which appears as
bin/sh.  I can, as root, do
# home/ken/kenslin/bin/sh
and find myself in a busybox shell but if I do
# chroot /home/ken/kenslin/ /bin/sh
I get 
chroot: cannot execute /bin/sh: No such file or directory

Can anyone shed any light on these problems?

TIA

ken

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