Datasheet

“main” (Installation and Administration) — 2004/6/25 — 13:29 — page 131 — #157
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3
Special Installation Procedures
The README file in the boot directory provides details about the floppy
disk images. Read these files with more or less.
The other disk images (modules1, modules2, modules3, and modules4)
can be created in the same way. These floppy disks are required if you have
USB or SCSI devices or a network or PCMCIA card that you want to ad-
dress during the installation. A module disk may also be needed to use a
special file system during the installation.
To use a custom kernel during the installation, the procedure is a bit more
complex. In this case, write the default image bootdisk to the floppy disk
then overwrite the kernel linux with your own kernel (see Section 9.6 on
page 239):
dd if=/media/cdrom/boot/bootdisk of=/dev/fd0 bs=8k
mount -t msdos /dev/fd0 /mnt
cp /usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/vmlinuz /mnt/linux
umount /mnt
3.6.3 Booting from a Floppy Disk (SYSLINUX)
The boot disk can be used for handling special installation requirements
(for example, if the CD-ROM drive is not available). See Section 3.6.1 on
page 129 or Section 3.6.2 on the facing page for more information about
creating boot disks.
The boot procedure is initiated by the boot loader SYSLINUX (syslinux).
When the system is booted, SYSLINUX runs a minimum hardware detection
that mainly consists of the following steps:
1. The program checks if the BIOS provides VESA 2.0–compliant frame-
buffer supports and boots the kernel accordingly.
2. The monitor data (DDC info) is read.
3. The first block of the first hard disk (MBR) is read to map BIOS IDs to
Linux device names during the boot loader configuration. The pro-
gram attempts to read the block by means of the the lba32 functions
of the BIOS to determine if the BIOS supports these functions.
131SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server