Gentoo on non bootable drives

[Charles Steinkuehler]

rsobba at kcnet.com wrote:
> Is anyone familar with how to install Gentoo on a PC where the bios does 
> not support booting from the CD - drive? I have created an bootable 
> diskette in Redhat but am unable to find any info on the web including the 
> Gentoo site. And on a related subject does anyone know how to copy the 
> data base or file containing all emails within Evolution? I have many 
> saved e-mails from this group and would hate to loose them, if it makes 
> any difference I currently use Mandrake 8.0

I'm not familiar with the Gentoo boot CD, but I can maybe help anyway.

There are a few different methods of creating a bootable CD image.  The 
most common is perhaps the "floppy emulation" method.  If the Gentoo CD 
uses this method, there should be a floppy image available somewhere (if 
you're in luck on the CD itself) that you can dd to a standard floppy 
and use to boot.

If Gentoo isn't using the floppy boot method, you need to track down 
three things (with any luck, these files will be directly readable off 
the CD):

1) The kernel used to boot off the CD
2) The initial ramdisk used to boot off the CD
3) Any default kernel parameters passed when booting to do an install

With this information you can setup your favorite boot-loader (syslinux 
for a floppy or FAT HDD partition, ldlinux for a dos environment, or the 
more normal lilo or grub).  Just copy the kernel and initial ramdisk 
somewhere your boot loader can get to them, create an appropriate boot 
entry (including any default kernel parameters), and off you go.

Once the kernel is running with the initial ramdisk image, it should 
find your CD-ROM, and continue the install process just like it booted 
from the CD.  The kernel doesn't generally care, or even know about how 
it got boot-strapped into memory and executed, so the install process 
should work fine regardless of your boot method, as long as you 
duplicate everything the kernel *DOES* care about, which is the kernel 
version, initial ramdisk image, and kernel parameters.

IIRC, it's also possible to "bootstrap" Gentoo from a running 
system...to do this, you'd boot into a linux environment (perhpas with a 
rescue disk, or something like tomsrtbt), do a chroot to the gentoo CD, 
then fire off the gentoo install process (by running a script, IIRC).

NOTE: You might have to do something like "su -" once you chroot to get 
the proper gentoo install environment.

I did an install of gentoo this way once (into a spare partition on my 
RH box), but it was quite a while ago, and I'm not sure if the gentoo 
install process has changed enough that this method would still work...

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net