making cd image

[Meshounah]

i have my little kernel but my question is... how can i put grub on a CD along with my kernel?

on the other hand... is it possible for grub to network boot a kernel from my dev machine?


I'd also like to thank Candy, frank, Alboin, AJ, JamesM, Combuster, and everyone else who helped me with my cross-compiler problems

[Combuster]

i have my little kernel but my question is... how can i put grub on a CD along with my kernel?

If you have a working floppy image with grub and kernel, you can use El Torito emulation to build the corresponding Bootable CD

Grub can be installed natively to CD as well. IIRC a quick howto is in their documentation.

Grub seems to support network booting as well but its tricky. Google revealed a promising document

[paul]

To make a bootable CD using grub, just make a directory (mines called iso) which holds what you want on the cd. You must have a boot/grub directory within this iso directory, which contains a menu.lst and the file stage2_eltorito from grub (it's somewhere on the hard drive with most linux distros).

Then run the following command from the parent of the iso directory:

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mkisofs -R -b boot/grub/stage2_eltorito -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -o mycd.iso iso

This will produce a file named mycd.iso which should be bootable.

If you're using windows, I have no idea

Edit:

Looks like mkisofs is available for windows too: http://smithii.com/cdrtools

[Meshounah]

ok for simplicity sake i'm going to do what combuster said... i downloaded a grub floppy image that i found on the wiki but how do i extract it?

[Combuster]

google for one of the following:

powerarchiver
winrar
cygwin

[Meshounah]

i have winrar but it won't let me extract it...

[Combuster]

you're right, I remember it not working half of the time

that still leaves two options though

[JamesM]

GRUB's netboot is not tricky in the slightest.

Make sure your dev machine has atftpd (trivial FTP daemon) installed.

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/sbin/atftpd --daemon /path/to/dev/directory

Then when grub boots on your test machine, type 'c' for a console and:

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dhcp (get an ip address)
tftpserver 192.my.server.ip
kernel (nd)/kernel.bin (assuming kernel.bin is your kernel, in your dev dir)
module (nd)/initrd.bin (I would do this, depends if you have any modules to load)
boot

Dead easy. There are guides on the internet about it. You can put all those commands into your menu.lst and let it do it automagically.

JamesM

[Meshounah]

ok another question how do i do it in cygwin don't i use the "dd" command?

but its not there

[frank]

It should be there somewhere. It may not be a part of the default install however. You may have to look for it in the package list.

[mohammed]

ok for simplicity sake i'm going to do what combuster said... i downloaded a grub floppy image that i found on the wiki but how do i extract it?

WinImage is a great program that allow you to extract and modify the img files and it's working under windows

[Meshounah]

winimage is not free... the "dd" command is not listed in cygwin download app

[Alboin]

winimage is not free... the "dd" command is not listed in cygwin download app

I always used Rawwrite when I was working in Windows. (He also appears to have a win version of dd on his site as well.)

[Candy]

Search for John Newbigin, he ported DD to windows.

[frank]

Do you have cygutils installed? I think it might be in that one.