Booting FAI from local disk

[Thomas Lange]

Hi there,

this sounds a little bit funny but why not. If you can't boot from
network card you must always boot from floppy, which is slow. Now you
can boot FAI from the local disk (if the disk is not damaged).
You only need an additional very small partition  of 2 MB.

Define this partition in disk_config for your hosts e.g:

disk_config hda

primary  /fai-boot     2	rw,nosuid		; -c
primary  /              50	rw,errors=remount-ro 	; -c
.
.
.


and add a line to class/S90partition.sh:

grep -v "^#" /fai/disk_config/$c | \
	grep -q '[[:space:]]/fai-boot[[:space:]]'  && echo "FAI_BOOTPART"

The  script  scripts/FAI_BOOTPART then appends some lines to your lilo.conf
and makes the kernel available.

#! /bin/sh

# create a partition for booting FAI from local disk and
# add this kernel to lilo

# Thomas Lange, Uni Koeln, 12/2000

echo "Add /fai-boot partition to lilo.conf"

cp -dpR /boot $target/fai-boot

cd $target/boot
kernelversion=`ls vmlinuz-*`
mknod $target/dev/boot255 c 0 255

cat >> $target/etc/lilo.conf <<EOF
image=/fai-boot/boot/$kernelversion
root=/dev/boot255
label=FAI
EOF

mkdir $target/fai-boot/etc
cp $target/etc/lilo.conf $target/fai-boot/etc

$target/sbin/lilo -r $target



After the first installation you can press shift when the Lilo prompt
appears. There you can select FAI, so the kernel which uses the
nfsroot filesystem will be booted.

This feature is available in the CVS repository and will be included
in the next FAI release.

-- 
 Thomas
----------------------------------------------------------------------
            Thomas Lange
Institut fuer Informatik        mailto:lange at informatik.Uni-Koeln.DE
   Universitaet zu Koeln
            Pohligstr. 1        Telefon: +49 221 470 5303
             50969 Koeln        Fax    : +49 221 470 5317

1024D/AB9B66FD AEA6 A8C1 BD8E 67C4 8EF6  8BCA DC13 E54E AB9B 66FD
----------------------------------------------------------------------