I want to thank everyone for the advice posted in reponse to my
question. Unfortunately, I must have made my question very unclear.
I originally wanted to maintain a single bootable linux image, about 1MB in
size, that could be dd'd to a hard drive partition or floppy disk, that
would be able to boot with no change other than rdev'ing the kernel (which
would be at the start of the image). The corresponding root filesystem
would begin somewhere just past the kernel, requiring the kernel to seek to
a predefined location in the image before mounting it root. I looked very
hard at LILO, but it appears that you must reinstall LILO if the boot
device changes, and in my application that wasn't an option. I got some
good advice about initrd and loopback filesystem, which is very promising
(but does require a bootloader). In any case, I have abandoned my pursuit
of the original solution, and am going to use multiple images instead.
Thanks again to everyone's kind and helpful response; I am more
prepared now to solve my problem. :)
cheers,
-bp
-- B. James Phillippe <bryan@terran.org> Linux Software Engineer, WGT Inc. http://w3.terran.org/~bryan
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