Booting Up

To boot from the Bootable CD, you need to start by making your computer bootable from its CD-ROM drive. This varies from system to system, but usually involved setting the BIOS (Basic I/O System) on your computer to allow bootup from the CD-ROM before other devices. This is normally done by pressing the [del] or [f1] key as the computer reboots, and then searching from the menu items to find a setting that affects boot device or some such thing. Set this to boot from the CD-ROM first, then the device you used to use for bootups (typically the first hard disk, or a SCSI disk, or sometimes even a floppy).

Once the bootup configuration for your computer is properly set, place the Bootable CD in your CD-ROM drive. The 180 Meg CD fits in the center indentation of the CD-ROM drive. Close the CD drive, then reboot your computer. By special request we will provide full sized CDs for those CD readers that don't allow 180Meg CDs (e.g., some of the automatic loaders need a full-sized CD).

On bootup, the Bootable CD will go through its normal startup routine. The first thing you will see after system self-tests is a menu that looks something like this:

linux		diskless	debug
linux-800	diskless-800	memtest
linux-1024	diskless-1024
linux-1280	diskless-1280
linux-1600	diskless-1600

The bootup modes are as follows:

• linux-xxx[x] boots from the CD-ROM mounting the CD-ROM's contents with the screen resolution for normal login screens set at the resolution selected by the number. The numbers indicate 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, and 1600x1200 respectively. If the resolution you select does not work you will be prompted for alternatives.
• diskless-xxx[x] boots from the CD-ROM but instead of mounting the CD as a device, it copies the CD contents into RAM and ejects the CDROM. In diskless mode you can then load additional CD-ROMs for use, or you can simply start the computer working for you and put the CD back in your shirt pocket.
• debug mode puts you in a mode that provides absolutely the minimal functionality that can be created under Linux. There is really nothing you can do in this mode unless you are a Bootable CD wizard, but you can feel free to try...
• memtest performs memory testing on your computer. It is a very handy memory diagnostic that we have used to debug memory problems on lots of computers. It will also tell you how much memory you have.
• If you know how lilo and similar bootup systems work you can put in specific parameters for things like screen resolution, and so forth. You are entirely on your own for this.

You will have from 3 to 5 seconds from the appearance of this menu to make a selection. If no selection is made, it will default to 'linux' which is 80x25' text mode.

After this, Linux will proceed to boot up. This typically takes from 10 to 45 seconds depending on details of your hardware. You will see a lot of messages, including some things that may look like errors. Please enjoy reading them if you like. In the end, WG will either fail or succeed, leaving you with a situation where the computer will do nothing else (i.e., fail) or where you are prompted for login (i.e., succeed).

If you are prompted for login, you are done booting up. Otherwise, you need to try another bootup selection (if you tried one in the first place). There are some systems that WG will not run on. If you provide us with details we will try to make it work on those systems as well.

Bootup Floppies

If you also have a floppy disk drive on your computer and if it has a floppy installed with a file in the root directory called "PLAC.go", this file will be executed as root during the login process and before the login prompt is enabled. This has provided for a great number of useful capabilities for creating 'custom installs' of Bootable CD. For example, using only these floppies, we have built a 32 computer network that automatically does recovery from the failure of up to half of the computers, includes a server, browser, firewalls, logging servers, special security devices, and large file systems. The entire network runs without a single 'installed' operating system, and when a computer fails, we simply replace the hardware, move the Bootable CD and floppy over, and off we go. More details are provided in the "Sample Applications" area of this web site (use the menu above).

What Bootup Does

The bootup process is detailed after bootup in the file system. For details of logging in, go the the next part of this tutorial. After logging in as root, you might want to look at "Report2.txt" for details of devices found on the system. The file /var/log/messages will have details of bootup messages. The file 'drives' will tell you of and disk drives found. All syslog messages are also sent to virtual terminal 12 as well. To access them, press [alt-f12]. To return to the normal console, press [alt-f1].

Normally, the bootup process locates devices attached to the system and configures for their use without actually using them. Disks are found, their partitions identified, and their filesystems are mounted read-only in /mnt/. For example, if you have an IDE hard disk attached to the secondary IDE chain as a slave, and it has the second partition as a FAT file system, it will appear as /mnt/hdd2 after bootup. You can safely read from it without altering its contents using normal system functions and programs.

The Bootable CD will NOT automatically bring up networking or enable networked services. This provides for protection against any sort of remote attack against a Bootable CD system at bootup. See later sections of this tutorial for details on how to bring up networks, etc.

How do I Reboot?

Unless you have remounted disk drives as read/write devices during your session, it is generally safe to reboot our Bootable CD system by ANY of these methods:

• (1) Press the reset button on your computer.
• (2) Pull out the plug and plug it back in.
• (3) Press [ctrl] [alt] [del] (slow and not needed)

As a general rule, I press the reset button unless I have done something rather unusual in my Bootable CD use.