Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 For Intel x86
Chapter 10 - Technical Information on the Boot Floppies

10.1 Source Code

The boot-floppies package contains all of the source code and documentation for the installation floppies.

10.2 Rescue Floppy

The rescue floppy has an Ext2 filesystem (or a FAT filesystem, depending on your architecture), and you should be able to access it from anything else that can mount Ext2 or FAT disks. The Linux kernel is in the file linux.bin. The file root.bin is a gzip-compressed disk image of a 1.4MB Minix or Ext2 filesystem, and will be loaded into the RAM disk and used as the root filesystem.

10.3 Replacing the Rescue Floppy Kernel

If you find it necessary to replace the kernel on the rescue floppy, you must configure your new kernel with these features linked in, not in loadable modules:

• RAM disk support (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_RAM)

• Initial RAM disk (initrd) support (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_INITRD)

• Kernel support for ELF binaries (CONFIG_BINFMT_ELF)

• Loop device support (CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LOOP)

• FAT, Minix, and Ext2 filesystems (some architectures don't need FAT and/or Minix filesystems — see the source) For Intel x86, Minix file support is not required, but MSDOS and ext2 are.

• Socket filtering for DHCP (CONFIG_FILTER)

• Packet socket, also for DHCP (CONFIG_PACKET)

• Unix domain sockets for syslogging — is provided as a module in the vanilla flavor (CONFIG_UNIX)

Download a set of boot floppies: root, rescue, and driver disks. You need to know that udma66-ext3, idepci, and compact use flavored kernels. One reason to use the compact set, for instance, is that it has only 1 driver disk and your custom kernel will likely have all the drivers you need built in. The downside is that it requires an extra manual step unless you built your custom kernel with the same flavor name (see make-kpkg in the kernel-package). You may also see some error messages regarding modules.

Mount the rescue disk image, something like the following.

             mount -t auto -o loop rescue.bin /mnt

Assuming you used /mnt as the mount point, copy your custom kernel to /mnt/linux.bin. Next run the script rdev.sh which resides in /mnt, which assumes it will find the kernel as described here.

If you want to be complete about it, you'll also want to gzip the System.map from your custom kernel and place it in /mnt as sys_map.gz and gzip the .config and place it in /mnt as config.gz.

Now you can umount your disk image and burn your floppies. You will probably want to ``Install Kernel and Driver Modules'' using the floppies you just built to get your custom kernel installed on the hard drive. This is why having one driver disk is nice.

If you are using a disk set featuring a flavored kernel, you will need to switch to tty2 and hit Enter to get a prompt. Type ls /target/lib/modules to see where the driver disk put your modules. Then uname -r to find out where the modules should be. You'll then want to do something suitable like the following.

     	mv /target/lib/modules/* /target/lib/modules/`uname -r`

Now you may exit out of the shell and return to tty1. If you didn't perform the last step properly, then ``Configure Device Driver Modules'' won't find any modules and thus will be sad.

You'll also want to replace the modules.tgz file on the driver floppies. This file simply contains a gzip-compressed tar file of /lib/modules/kernel-version; make it from the root filesystem so that all leading directories are in the tar file as well.

Installing Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 For Intel x86