
MDLBL - Multi-Disk-Linux-Boot-Loader v0.1a
==========================================

During the last years it has got harder and harder to
create linux kernel + initrd rescue or install floppies.
The linux kernel image as well as te initrd image is
often bigger than 1.44 MB nowdays and so don't fit on
single floppies anymore.

MDLBL is a simple tool which creates bootdisks which do
contain kernel and initrd images splitted up in small
slices which do fit on 1.44 MB floppies. 

The bootdisk does contain a small FreeDOS based system
which loads the contents of all disks into a ramdisk and
loads kernel and initrd using loadlin afterwards.

Usage:
------

Copy a kernel image as 'vmlinuz' in the mdlbl directory.
Copy the initrd image as 'initrd' in the mdlbl directory.

Run the ./makedisks.sh script.

Write the freshly created disk*.img files to floppies and
boot it on the target system.

Requirements:
-------------

The script depends on a more or less recent version of 'bash',
the 'split' tool from gnu textutils (coreutils), a running
kernel with loopback blockdevice support and a 'mount' command
which does recognise the '-o loop' option.

Your /etc/mtab shouldn't be a symlink to /proc/mounts or 'mount'
won't free the loopback devices it's been using.

Links:
------

This package does contain binaries from the following other packages:

FreeDOS: www.freedos.org
Loadlin: http://elserv.ffm.fgan.de/~lermen/
XMSdsk:  http://www.simtel.net/pub/pd/4825.html


Thanks to Christian Marg <christian.marg@tu-clausthal.de> from the
syslinux mailing list for the idea and the link to XMSdsk.

MDLBL is created by Clifford Wolf <clifford@clifford.at> for
primary use in the ROCK Linux <www.rocklinux.org> install and rescue
boot floppies.

