**Not necessarily asking "HOW TO", just looking for experiences or thoughts**

This is what im looking to do. Create a small partition on the hd say 5 megs or maybe 10 ;D and having all the boot and install floppys basically on that partition (only the ones that I need). When the computer boots up into LILO it would have the standard choice of booting the OS but there would also be a choice that would boot up that small partition and be just like booting from the floppies So i could enter setup all over if needing to do a full system install.

Anyway I was just wondering if anyone's done this before and if so leave any comments from your experience.

I don't get it, why boot on the hd to do a setup install, you'll need the cdrom anyway

Well, it's a "good" idea if the installation is done trought the network. Anyways, i guess we all prefer the cd

because the install is going to be done over NFS useing Windows Services for Unix. The effect is minimizing recovery time due to user error ( man i wish certain people would stop touching my servers ) corrupting or doing something stupid to the system. Everything on the system stays the same after its setup aside from three directories which get tar'd and gzip'd when necessary and stored somewhere else. The last thing I want is to put the cd's in and have some CRC error and find out that part of my floppy got erased because someone didn't put stuff back where it belongs.

The other option is to keep all the packages on the seperate install partition but it contains a lot of custom packaged stuff and other repackaged stock packages and I dont want to store it on cd. And placing it in the so called setup partition is placing it outside of my redundancy loop.

Thats all. Of course I'll still be burning a custom set of CD's as a last resort option incase of a catastrophie.

You like cd's, I like Hard Drives

So why not precise you want this for net install at the beginning that helps reader to understand.

In this case, I would say for the computer there is no difference if datas are on fd or hd so you can create subdirectory (one per floppy boot disk) in your little boot partition and edit lilo accordingly.

b/c i was looking for user input of any quirks that might popup in doing this little task or any other experiences, positive or negative. I assume it'll be painless but you never know

The logic being, if you've done it then you already know the reasons you did it. I'm doing this though my reasons my differ in some respect. The reasons dont matter but the task at hand is still the same.

laterz

instead of using the floppy root disk images, use the initrd from the installtion CD. You can easily boot that.
i am cuurently working on a tool for my 'family' of Amigo linux distros, that combines the Slackware 'setup' scripts, with a mor general rscue system, and that might also be uded as a 'live' CD- basically combinig the three root filesystems from the installation initrd, rescue.gz(floppy) and the SLackware LiveCD(#2)
What you want to do actually makes very good sense, especially when you want to upgrade your installlation. You can mount the filesystem and safely remove and replace any package.

yeah that was one of the reasons I was going to do this, so I wouldn't have to keep burning cd's anytime I changed some small aspect of something due to whatever the case may be.

Thanks for the initrd tip, that'd make the easy, easier

[edit]

btw, never heard of Amigo (thought maybe you meant amiga at first) so I looked into it. Odd little project you got going for yourself Best to you on it

BTW, I am currently working on new projects including running Slack READ-WRITE from an NTFS partition (works!) and also a Slack distro thaqt will safely run read-write from a FLASh or CF device.
Amigo