[TUHS] Pre-init initialization

[Adam Thornton]

MCA support came pretty late, so that's not terribly surprising.

As did booting-from CD-ROM, for that matter.  I think I remember a fairly
long period where the CD-ROM hung off the SoundBlaster, not the IDE bus.

Adam

On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 9:22 PM Kevin Bowling <kevin.bowling at kev009.com>
wrote:

> Yup I remember doing a boot/root floppies with Slackware as late as the
> early 2000s on an IBM PS/2 Model 95.
>
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2019 at 7:29 PM Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On 8/9/19 6:23 PM, Theodore Y. Ts'o wrote:
>> > In '95, Slackware started releasing on CD-ROM's, and while there may
>> > have been boot/root floppies, I suspect more and more they were used as
>> > rescue media, since installing from a CD-ROM was *way* more convenient.
>>
>> The boot & root floppies were how you booted Slackware for a long time.
>> The CD-ROM was unbootable for quite a while.  You booted off of floppy
>> and the installation scripts would ask you which drive had the CD-ROM in
>> it to mount and install from.
>>
>> > I'm guesing what you were doing was creating a kernel plus initramfs
>> > which was sufficient to mount a root file system elsewhere as an
>> > emergency "boot this failsafe kernel off the floppy", perhaps?
>> > I don't think a kernel+initramfs on a single 1.44MB floppy would
>> > have been sufficient for use as an install medium by '99.  Or were
>> > you making an emergency USB thumb-drive as a rescue device, maybe?
>>
>> It was a re-roll of the above boot & root disk set.  It was not rescue
>> media per-say.  Though the standard boot & root disk set did get used
>> for rescue purposes in addition to installation.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Grant. . . .
>> unix || die
>>
>>
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