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## 4. The BOOT/ROOT disks and Eltorito bootable CD-Rom

Two disks are provided to allow using partition image from floppy disks. The boot disk was created from a recent kernel. This kernel include the support of many file systems, as ext2fs, vfat, ntfs, and reiserfs. It allows you to save/read image files on many file systems. The kernel also includes many drivers,such as those for the parallel ZIP drive, various SCSI interfaces and so on, to allow the use of many types of media to read/write the image files. The root disk was created from a slackware root disk. There is very little space on the disk, so some common commands may be missing, but there are anough for the normal operations of Partition Image. We have tried to remove debug data from executable binary files with objcopy, and we compressed the root disk with gzip -9, but all the libraries and commands require too much disk space.If you require particular modules not included on the disk, you can compile you own modules and swap them for some of the disk that you don't need. To do this though, you will need to compile from the same kernel source. Check the disk to ensure you use the correct version code.See the FAQ for this and other options.

Since the 0.3.5 version, an eltorito CD-ROM, created from the slackware 7.0 one, is provided. It allows you to run Partition Image from a CD-ROM, without any installed linux system. This is useful for systems which don't run Linux, or when your only drive is the one which needs to be restored. Providing the image file is small enough, it is even possible to include these on the same CD, making restoring very easy.

## 4.1 Why these disks ?

You may need these two floppies to use Partition Image in some cases:

- You want partition image to work on your only linux root partition and then you cannot run partition image from the system which uses this partition to work.
- You don't have any linux system installed on your computer and you want to run partition image
- You don't want to compile Partition Image

## 4.2 How to create these disks ?

When you have downloaded the two files (boot disk image and root disk image), you will use them to create the floppies disks. You need two 1,44 MB floppies.

Under Linux:

- insert the boot disk
- type: dd if=partimage-x.y.z-bootdisk-w.raw of=/dev/fd0
- insert the root disk
- type: dd if=partimage-x.y.z-rootdisk-w.raw of=/dev/fd0

Under DOS/Windows: You need to download RAWRITE.EXE, which wan be found on Partition Image home page.(14 KB)

- insert the boot disk
- type: rawrite -f partimage-x.y.z-bootdisk-w.raw -d a:
- insert the root disk
- type: rawrite -f partimage-x.y.z-rootdisk-w.raw -d a:

## 4.3 How to use these disks ?

First, you must insert the boot disk, and power on your computer. Wait a few minutes. When you see the message "VFS: Insert root floppy disk to be loaded into RAM disk and press ENTER", insert the root disk and press enter. Instructions will explain you what to do to continue.

## 4.4 How to create an eltorito bootable CD-Rom ?

This section will help you to create a bootable CD-Rom, from the image file provided on partimage web site. Then, you just have to start your computer on this CD-Rom to able to run Partition Image, and to save/restore partitions. You won't need to have a linux system installed on your computer, or to use floppy disks to use partimage.

You will need to download the file partimage-x.y.z-bootcd-w.img first. (2.88 MB)

1) Create your main burning directory: for example "CDBurning".

2) Go in your main burning directory, and create a sub-directory named ".eltorito", and copy the 2.88 MB image file in this directory.

3) Copy all the other files in the main "CDBurning" directory. For example, your can copy all your image files. You can put 650 MB files here.

4) Now, create the ISO image with "mkisofs" Go in your main burning directory, with a console. Type the following command: mkisofs -o /tmp/cd-rescue.iso -R -V "Partition Image rescue" -v -J -T -d -D -b .eltorito/partimage-x.y.z-bootcd-w.img -c .eltorito/eltorito.boot -A "Partition Image" .

Don't forget the final point "." and update the file name with the name of the current version.

/tmp/cd-rescue.iso is the image file to create. You may need up to about 700 MB of free space to create this file. Then, if you don't have enough space on your root directory, please choose another temp path.

mkisofs will create a 650 MB image file (or smaller if you don't have a full CD), it can take time it's around 15 minutes usually.

5) It's time to burn your CD. You can use "cdrecord in console mode", or another GUI, as gCombust. See the man pages for cdrecord for more info if you need it.

6) Your bootable CD-Rom is now ready

You can also burn the bootable CD-Rom with Nero under Windows. That's very easy: You just have to choose the image file, and select that's a 2.88 MB floppy disk.

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