Cannot boot live CD using bootcdwrite

[nephew.tim]

Hello all,

Have a problem here that I am hoping to have solved. I personally prefer Ubuntu (being South African), but if we cannot get this to work, we will need to move back to Debian. :(

Previously using Debian 3.x and 4.0, the bootcd system worked well and allowed us to successfully backup our systems.

We installed a PDMENU script for a user on the running system to restore the image using bootcd2disk.

What it looks like is that from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server (i386 - have not tried others), IDE support has been totally removed and replaced by serial technology.

I found I had to take the following steps in order to get the image created:

1.) Symbolically link /boot/System.map-$kernelversion to /kernelinfo
2.) Remove symbolic link for /bin/sh to /bin/dash and use /bin/bash instead. (This I believe has been solved in Ubuntu 8.10)
3.) Modified the GRUB bit in /usr/share/bootcd/bootcd2probe to reflect the title I want when the image is nuked down.

Besides those modifications, I have changed nothing else.

The image is created perfectly and I can easily burn the ISO to disk. When trying to boot the disk, the probe happens and does a wonderful countdown (in the spirit of the New Year) ;) .
Thereafter, it complains that it is unable to change directory to /proc/ide. This, I am assuming is the filesystem on the CDFS.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks
From Tim

Ubuntu 8.04.1 LTS Server i386
bootcd_3.08ubuntu (even been as high as version 3.12)

[CarloSalvatore (carlosalvatore)]

You can try installing Ubuntu 7.10, then download from kernel.org a clean kernel, configure it using xconfig or menuconfig, (you can try google to get info about how to do it), compile it and finally create a deb package for your new kernel image and headers (obviously all this disabling the option SCSI Emulation) [You can google how to create your deb package from your kernel also].
Once you had finished with all this stuff you can upgrade (using apt and the internet or the alternate CD) Ubuntu.
First yo 8.04 and finally to 8.10.

If you're interested you can customize the installation CD to add your kernel as a package, or as the default kernel to boot from.

I hope it helps.

PS. Configuring and compiling your own kernel is very easy, so don't be afraid to try. (If you want to do some test before, try using a Virtual Box)