Re: Working boot/root

[Dan Olson <dano@agora.rdrop.com>]

> I recently tried the 1.44MB bootable floppy image from the archive. It boots
> fine and presents me with a login prompt; unfortunately, when I type 'root'
> and press return, it seems to hang.
>
> However, I don't know if this is the current boot/root. Is this a known or a
> fixed problem? If so, can anyone point me at a more recent image I could try?

Have you tried the 720k image or seperate boot/root disks?  I know those
are always updated.

> I have an ancient Toshiba laptop, with an 8086 processor an 1MB of memory.

Cool, I've never seen an 8086 machine with a full meg or ram before!

> no way of getting it back on, I'd like to shrink the DOS partition to 5MB or
> so and use the rest for ELKS. This means I need (a) a FIPS equivalent that
> runs on an 8086 and (b) something that will boot an ELKS kernel from DOS. Any
> suggestions?

There was a DOS program that came on my old Linux cd way back when that
shrunk FAT partitions, might be just what you're after, but I forget the
name.  I suppose there's a chance it had 80286+ code in it too, don't
know.  Maybe Loadlin would work with ELKS, don't know if it would be happy
with a non-Linux kernal.  Maybe you should just replace the floppy, it
might be tough to actually get ELKS stuff to/from the laptop without one.

	Dan