floppy-less floppy installation

partitioning

The P2020 comes from the factory with a 511 cylinder (4008 MB) primary partition for drive C with the rest allocated to a volume called "DATA" on drive D (living inside an extended partition). This is exceptionally insightful of Fujitsu as it means that installation of Linux can proceed without the need for a live re-partitioning tool.

Each cylinder of the disk is 16065 sectors (8 MB) in size due to a logical geometry of 255 heads and 63 sectors per track. fdisk reports 1835 cylinders.

I chose this partitioning scheme: 

Partition  Cylinders  Size/MB  Content
---------  ---------  -------  -------
1          511        4,008    Windows/ME (C drive)
2          1          8        Rescue
3          15         118      Swap
4                              <Extended Partition>
5          522        4,095    Root
6          786        6,166    FAT32 Data drive
Ensure that the extended partition is type 0xf (Win95 Ext'd) or Windows/ME will refuse to see the data volume

The above scheme allows for installation of Debian GNU/Linux from the 'Rescue' partition as opposed to a floppy disk (which the P2020 doesn't have). It also assumed that you want a big data volume with which to share stuff between Linux and Windows. A Linux-only scheme would look much simpler.

installation of Debian Potato

Here are the details of a very specific installation:
  1. Have no bootable Debian CDs
  2. Want to keep the Windows installation
  3. Have a method of getting files onto the Windows partition, for example a USB zip drive or a PCMCIA network card
  4. Have bootable CDs for another system that can build a rescue installation in its own partition. This method has been tested with RedHat 5.1 CDs

Potato installation is probably straightforward with a set of bootable Debian Potato CDs, but if you don't have any, then some digital contortionism is required. Without a floppy disk drive, it is impossible to boot from floppy. Installation from hard disk drive is covered in the Debian installation documentation, but only from MS-DOS. The P2020 comes with Windows/ME installed, which only offers MS-DOS from a boot floppy and not from the hard disk: not helpful if you don't have a floppy disk drive. Nonetheless, the floppy disk images are required for this installation and I went for the "idepci" flavour, before following this recipe:

  1. Use another PC to cut rescue.bin and root.bin to a floppy as you would for a normal (floppyful) installation
  2. Boot rescue on the PC as if you were going to install on that PC
  3. Load the root floppy, but instead of selecting any menu options, dive straight for the shell
  4. Tar up the contents of the root filesystem that you've just booted with something like this: 
    $ mount /dev/hda4 /mnt ; cd / ; tar cf /mnt/rescue.tgz bin etc tmp ...

    where "..." is replaced by the rest of the entries in root, except proc and mnt and /dev/hda4 is somewhere on your floppyful PC from where you can get files onto the Lifebook's C drive

    BusyBox tar won't listen to the "z" or "l" options, which is a shame, and the reason that all items in "/" except proc and mnt (which you don't want to archive) must be specified explicitly

  5. Use the file transport to get rescue.tgz onto the C drive of the Lifebook. While you're at it, get rescue.bin, drivers.tgz and base2_2.tgz on there too, so that it looks like this: 
    [-]C:
 \-[-]debian
 |  \-[-]dists
 |     \-[-]potato
 |        \-[-]main
 |           \-[-]disks-i386
 |              \-[-]current
 |                 \-[-]idepci
 |                 |  \-[#]linux
 |                 |  \-[#]drivers.tgz
 |                 \-[-]images-1.44
 |                 |  \-[-]idepci
 |                 |     \-[#]drivers.tgz  *
 |                 |     \-[#]rescue.bin
 |                 \-[#]base2_2.tgz
 \-[#]rescue.tgz

    * dbootstrap wanted rescue.bin and drivers.tgz in the same folder. drivers.tgz is not normally here

  6. Use the Linux CD to install a throwaway Linux installation, which will only be used to build the rescue partition. It can be installed on partition 5 (the area that will eventually hold the real root). Select minimal packages because it won't stay around for long anyway
  7. Boot the throwaway Linux and use it to partition up the rest of the drive and format the Rescue partition as ext2
  8. Unpack rescue.tgz into the Rescue partition
  9. Create the missing directories: /proc and /mnt
  10. Copy the rescue kernel (.../idepci/linux) somewhere on the throwaway partition, probably /boot
  11. Edit lilo.conf and add an entry that points to the rescue kernel
  12. Reboot and select the rescue kernel option, passing the parameter: root=/dev/hda2. This should boot the installation system with which to put the final installation on to /dev/hda5
  13. From here on in it looks like a normal floppyful install, using a local partition to supply the drivers and the base system, which is always a good idea anyway

RedHat 5.1 could not cope with swap partitions bigger than 127 MB. If you want a bigger swap partition, you could always leave space in the scheme for it, but only create 118 MB until your legacy Linux is out of your system. fdisk can create partitions starting anywhere on the disk (not just at the start of a block of unallocated space like Disk Druid).

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($Revision: 1.2 $, $Date: 2006/09/13 06:41:49 $)