aoriii

I have a new laptop that will be primarily used by my daughter. I've installed XP for her to use for school work (and for my wife to use). I also want to be able to use Linux, but I want it to be transparent to them. I've installed Knoppix on one of our other computers and I let LILO handle the booting, but I didn't like the fact that they had to navigate a LILO screen to get XP to boot (neither did they). So I guess what I'm looking for is some confirmation that what I'm about to undertake will work the way I think it will. When all the dust settles, I want 2 conditions to be met:

1) When the laptop is booted, I want it to boot as if linux never existed (i.e - directly to XP without any bootloader screens)

2) If the laptop is booted with my usb thumbdrive (yes, it's bootable and the mobo/bios will boot from a usb thumbdrive), the bootloader will be read from the usb drive and will boot into the Knoppix install (at which point, I would assume the thumbdrive can be removed). I want to do this via a thumbdrive, because the laptop has no floppy drive.

I have the HD partitioned as follows: (from qparted)

hda1 - 40G - NTFS - winXP
hda2 - 100M - /boot partition from previous RH9 install
hda3 - 15G - formated ext3 - nothing installed (this will be were knoppix will be installed
hda4/5 - 1G - linux swap file

I want to run sudo knoppix-installer and install to hda3. I'll put the boot loader in the MBR. After installation, I'll boot with with a CDROM version of the win98 boot disk and run fdisk /mbr to rebuild my mbr to 'xp only'. I'll then boot the knoppix CD on a seperate computer (one with a floppy drive). I'll create the boot floppies and then copy the contents to my bootable USB thumbdrive. Then (hopefully), I'll be able to boot from the USB into the HD-installed knoppix distro - thereby, meeting condition #2 from above.

Will this work? or am I just dreaming? Is there a better/simpler way of doing this with the materials I have?

Okay, now, tell me what I've missed, or what I'm over-simplifying. I'm still pretty new to Linux (obviously, since I'm still using Knoppix), so plese keep you responses as simple as possible.

Thanks in advance for any input/wisdom/advice!

aoriii

I've just discussed this issue with a friend (linux friendly) and he suggested that all I would need to do to meet my 2 conditions is to copy the installed kernel to my jumpdrive, and that should acccomplish what I want to do fairly simply.

Anyone have any more insight on this (he was a little vague on details).

Will this work as advertsed???


thanks again

gmplague

If you simply don't want your wife and daughter to have to navigate the lilo screen to boot, why don't you edit your lilo.conf and make windows the default os (timeout 5 or 10 seconds), and then it will just boot... they can hit enter if they want to boot faster.

Although I will say I like the elegance of not having to partition the hard drive, keeping linux on a seperate thumbdrive. I myself am trying to accomplish that task and that's how I stumbled upon this post. I think if i can rawwrite the boot floppy image (boot.img in the /mnt/cdrom/KNOPPIX/ directory) I will be able to do so.

I'm still investigating the matter, but I will let you know how this turns up. Just imagine, keeping your home directory and an entire linux distro with you at all times on a thumbdrive, anytime you go to the library, use a friend's pc, etc. you can boot into home. I get warm and fuzzy just thinking about it

David522

This will do what your wanting it to do but it runs with in a os Im sure you could get away with the one running from the CD and it would be a bit faster.

http://www.metropipe.net/index.shtml