[PARPORT] Linux paride boot disk

From: Jan Just Keijser (jjk@sightpath.com)
Date: Fri Mar 10 2000 - 11:33:41 EST

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    Hi,

    I hope you can help me. I am trying to boot RedHat 6.1 using a
    Microsolutions BackPack "Bantam" parallel CD-ROM and I have tried and
    tried and tried, but I cannot get the thing to work. What I am after is
    this:

    I want to be able to do unattended installs of RH 6.1 using a floppy, a
    parallel CD-ROM drive and a RH 6.1 CD.

    So far, I've been getting mixed results:

    1. attached the parallel CD-ROM drive to a working RH 6.1 system and
    installed the RH 6.1 default paride drivers:
      insmod parport
      insmod paride
      insmod bpck
      insmod pcd
    At this stage, pcd fails with an error message ('Autoprobe failed')

    2. download the latest Backpack Linux drivers from Microsolutions
    (http://www.micro-solutions.com) and installed those:
      insmod parport
      insmod paride
      insmod backpack
      insmod pcd
    and lo, behold, it finds the CD-ROM drive and everybody is happy. I can
    now mount a CD-ROM (mount /dev/pcd0 /mnt/cdrom -r) and everything is
    working OK. So far, so good.

    3. the next step was to create a boot disk so that I can install
    (unattendedly, was the ultimate goal) a PC using just a magic boot
    floppy, the parallel CD-ROM drive and a RH 6.1 CD. I downloaded the boot
    disk from the paride website (where I got these email addresses) and
    tried that. It didn't work, which didn't surprise me, since the
    'backpack' driver was missing.

    4. Added the 'backpack' driver to the paride-dd.img disk and tried again
    (I had to figure out that modules.cgz is modules.cpio.gz and all that
    jazz, but eventually I got there). On install ( linux dd ) it asked me
    for the driver disk and I inserted it; I selected the 'parallel port
    CD-ROM' and I could see that the loader was trying to insmod 'parport',
    'paride', 'backpack' and 'pcd' but it would not get beyond the point
    'Other CD-ROM'.

    the questions I now have are:
    1. how do I get beyond this point?
    2. why is the 'loader' executable different for a CD-ROM image, a floppy
    boot image, a PCMCIA boot image and now again this paride boot image?
    3. why is the loader so awfully big?

    thanks for any help and/or insights you might be able to give me,

    JJ Keijser
    SightPath Inc
    Waltham, MA

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