[BusyBox] boot cd

David Courtney blixel at gmail.com
Tue Dec 7 22:09:25 UTC 2004


I'm trying to learn how to make a bootable Linux CD with a bare
minimum of tools on it as I only need it to do a few things.  I've
spent hours searching google and experimenting with some various
methods explained in articles I found, but none of them have panned
out.

So far I have been able to use ISOLINUX to create a bootable CD by
following the instructions at http://syslinux.zytor.com/iso.php

The CD boots, finds my kernel, and then as expected it kernel panics
because it can't find anything else.  But at least getting to that
point assured me I was on the right track.

So next I knew I needed some kind of sane working environment for the
kernel to load.  Busybox was the first thing I thought of.  I may one
day be interested in compiling everything I want from source, but for
the time being Busybox is absolutely perfect for what I want.

I'm just not sure how to proceed from the point I'm at now.  I was
thinking I had to make an initrd image, mount it as a loop device, and
then install busybox to that location.  I have done that.  I then
updated my CD image to include the initrd image I created.  I reburned
the CDRW and tried to boot from it.

The loader finds and loads vmlinuz and even finds and loads intird ...
but then it just stops.  No errors.  This is exactly what I see:

--snip--
ISOLINUX 2.11 2004-08-16  Copyright (C) 1994-2004 H. Peter Anvin
Loading vmlinuz................................................
Loading initrd............ (many more dots)
Ready.

Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
--snip--

That's it.  Before I put the initrd image on the CD, it would actually
go a little farther.  Or at least I would get a lot of kernel output
as it probed my hardware before it paniced.

I feel like I'm pretty close to achieving my goal.  Can someone help
me make the final leap?



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