Linuxbios + Etherboot + tagged Kernel Image

Eric W. Biederman ebiederman at lnxi.com
Sun Apr 27 12:16:01 CEST 2003


Steve Gehlbach <steve at nexpath.com> writes:

> ron minnich wrote:
> 
> > my mistake. What I have done is this for now:
> > dd if=elfImage of=/dev/hda bs=4096 skip=1
> > preserves partition information. A kludge, but it works.
> >
> 
> IMHO it is a better solution than non-standard partitioning.  Actually I think
> the region past the first sector (512 bytes) is unused, if I am reading
> http://www.ata-atapi.com/hiwtab.htm correctly.

Right the region past the first sector (512 bytes) is unused.  Which
is why I just move up the start of first partition into the unused space.
I don't see how using the standard partition tables to force a partition
to a particular location on the disk is non-standard partitioning.

I agree it drops compatibility with ancient versions of DOS but otherwise
it is just reserving space.
 
> One should also point out that this overlaps into partition 1, if that is not
> obvious, so partition 1 should be large enough and unused.

So why should partition 1 not contain the correct information.

If you really want to dig into this, my proof of concept utility that
will allow much more interesting layouts than starting an ELF image
within 8K of the start of the disk.
ftp://ftp.lnxi.com/pub/src/linuxbios/installelf.c 

With that you can just put start of the ELF image in the unused space
(normally 63 sectors I think) and put the ELF image on a filesystem.

Eric




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