Re: parted on a 486 8Mbytes RAM

[Andrew Clausen]

On Sat, Sep 08, 2001 at 02:38:17PM +0200, Klaas Gadeyne wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I try to use parted on a 486 with no more then 8Mbytes ram to decrease my
> root partition. However, when the boot disk is loading (more specifically
> when is loading the ramdisk), the proces is stopped.
> I get

I have used parted on my 486, to do exactly the same thing ;)
(It had 8mb of RAM... now I have a different 486 with 24mb of RAM,
which is my mail/nfs/time/print server.  I also used parted on it,
when switching RH -> debian :)

> RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 582
> and then it stops.

8mb should be fine.  Maybe you have faulty RAM, or perhaps a faulty
floppy disk?

> I suppose this is due to the fact that I ran out of memory. I'm not an
> expert (not to say, I don't know anything about it :-) so I wonder if
> there is an easy way to strip some things of the bootdisk, or to compile
> my own "parted kernel image" (eg. I don't need pci support in the kernel,
> which could save me some RAM I suppose) so it can spare me some memory?
> 
> Would it be possible to make a normal bootdisk (with ramdisk), and another
> floppy with parted and the necessary libs on. Boot from the bootdisk,
> mount the other one and run parted?

Yes:

        # dd if=partimage.img of=partroot.gz bs=1k skip=582
        # gunzip partroot.gz
        # mount -o loop partroot /mnt/partroot
        # cp /mnt/partroot sbin/parted /mnt/floppy/sbin
        # cp /mnt/partrootlib/libc* /mnt/floppy/lib
        # umount /mnt/partroot

That said, I suspect it's another problem.

Andrew