I'm using a Fedora 14 live CD at the moment to make an image copy of one hard disk to another. It's working fine, but every minute or two the optical drive spins up for no apparent reason. I'm not sure what's doing that, but it occurs to me that it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone here, the other bird being that interactive use of the live CD is painfully slow due to the relatively poor performance of the optical drive.
How difficult would it be to have livecd-creator build the image such that there is a boot option to copy the entire livecd into a ramdisk, and unmount the optical drive? Since most new laptops have at least 3GB of RAM, this seems like it might be useful to a lot of users. It also would allow the optical drive to be used for other purposes while running the live image.
I suppose someone might ask why I am not using a live image on a USB flash drive rather than the optical drive. That's because the Sony VAIO I'm using seems to have BIOS issues that prevent successfully booting from a USB flash drive. :-(
Eric
I suppose someone might ask why I am not using a live image on a USB flash drive rather than the optical drive. That's because the Sony VAIO I'm using seems to have BIOS issues that prevent successfully booting from a USB flash drive.
Why not build a boot CD that your BIOS can use, with GRUB (or whatever you prefer) that will boot from a USB disk? I should think this would be significantly faster than a copy of 700MB from optical media, and have the further advantage that it leaves all RAM available to the operating system.
On 06/07/2011 04:17 AM, Eric Smith wrote:
I'm using a Fedora 14 live CD at the moment to make an image copy of one hard disk to another. It's working fine, but every minute or two the optical drive spins up for no apparent reason. I'm not sure what's doing that, but it occurs to me that it might be possible to kill two birds with one stone here, the other bird being that interactive use of the live CD is painfully slow due to the relatively poor performance of the optical drive.
How difficult would it be to have livecd-creator build the image such that there is a boot option to copy the entire livecd into a ramdisk, and unmount the optical drive? Since most new laptops have at least 3GB of RAM, this seems like it might be useful to a lot of users. It also would allow the optical drive to be used for other purposes while running the live image.
I suppose someone might ask why I am not using a live image on a USB flash drive rather than the optical drive. That's because the Sony VAIO I'm using seems to have BIOS issues that prevent successfully booting from a USB flash drive. :-(
Eric
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If you are talking about the live_ram argument passed to init, then we do not need the livecd-tools to do this. It may not be worth the maintainers patching the scripts to do this, because it is so easy to accomplish in your ks.cfg. Try a finish script or try the bootloader --append or just pas the arg to the bootloader interactively. See below.
Finish script: You can use a nochroot script to create an entry in isolinux.cfg and/or EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.conf with the live_ram arg or with any other extra args you may need. 1. copy one bootloader entry to $LIVE_ROOT/isolinux/liveram.cfg, 2. edit that append line and add live_ram, perl -pe "s/( append.*)/\1 live_ram/" -i $LIVE_ROOT/isolinux/liveram.cfg (Or some folks like sed as the stream editor in scripts, use that.) 3. catenate the liveram.cfg to the end of isolinux.cfg
**Use a similar command for your EFI boot loader config file
BOOTLOADER --append " You may even be able to pass the live_ram arg using the bootloader option in the ks.cfg file (i have not tried this but i think it should work) bootloader --append="console=tty console=ttyS0,115200n8 apic=debug ignore_loglevel splash=verbose live_ram"
Or you can interrupt the boot loader grub.efi or isolinux and pass the live_ram arg interactively.
I wasn't aware of the live_ram option. I must not have been googling for the right terms, since I didn't find that. Anyhow, that's exactly what I wanted. The best kind of feature request is for a feature that's already implemented! :-)
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