On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 19:40:39 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> Possibly my poudest achievement was splitting my OS disk across two
>>> floppies. This required me to completely require the boot script so
>>> that it rewired all the search paths dynamically, so half the files
>>> were on the boot floppy and half on another one, but the OS could
>>> still find all of them immediately. It's a lot more work than it
>>> sounds, but it worked magnificantly.
>>>
>>> [Again, I suppose theoretically you could do the same thing to a Linux
>>> distro with enough symlinks. But since I have absolutely NO CLUE how
>>> Linux actually works and this does not appear to be documented
>>> anywhere........]
>> 
>> man ln
> 
> I'm sure if you knew enough about Linux, you could do this kind of thing
> pretty easily. I don't have the knowledge required.

That's a far cry from "doesn't appear to be documented".

>> Thing is, there's no need in Linux to boot off multiple diskettes for
>> Linux - you can do a bootable CD that has everything you need *if* it
>> doesn't fit on a floppy.  But there are distributions (Damn Small Linux
>> for one, Puppy Linux for another IIRC) that are entirely contained on a
>> single diskette.
> 
> I *have* such a thing. It's a little Linux boot disk that allows you to
> access an NTFS partition and rewrite the SAM DB. [The thing that stores
> the local administrator password.] Very damn useful too! ;-)

Yep.  I've got a copy of that one around here somewhere as well from my 
days working on Win2K Server.  Pity it didn't work on the domain 
controller I was having problems with, though - W2Ks had a problem where 
if the administrator password got corrupted (that's the best guess 
Microsoft had about the issue), you couldn't even boot into safe mode.  
The utility disk at the time didn't understand AD DCs (indeed, since it 
was a DC, it wasn't the SAM but the AD database that needed to be 
accessed, and it wasn't designed for that).

Jim

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