The weather service is calling for 1-3 inches of snow, beginning around 4pm. Lovely. Hopefully they are wrong and it won't start until 5pm, letting me get home before it begins!

I have been trying to generate a custom version of Knoppix, using the instructions provided on the knoppix.net website. I ran into a few 'issues' along the way...

Used Partition Magic 8.0 to move partitions on an existing windows 2000 system to make room for the linux ext3 and swap partitions. Works great! Shrunk the windows partition, created a 4gb ext3 and 1gb swap partition, then installed linux on it. LILO went in correctly, and it booted up fine.

Now I follow the directions (sorta) and copy the contents of the CD into the folders indicated. When it comes time to chroot into the folders I just copied, it simply would not work. It seems that the instructions say to BOOT to KNOPPIX CD, and I didn't, figuring that booting to linux would do the same thing. So when I copied the folder over, I copied the compressed contents, not the expanded contents that would have been present had I booted to the CD. Ahhh... Boot to CD, NOW copy the contents of the folder, and then chrooting works just fine.

Follow the instructions some more, removed openoffice from the package system, then add the folders and files I needed for this recovery cd (compressed dd image of a vital system's HD). Now to generate the compressed file system image (the one I hadn't expanded before...).

Ran out of room. *sigh*

Used Partition Magic again - shrank the W2K partition even more, adding 2gb to the ext3 partition (for linux) and 1gb to the swap partition. Rebooted into windows fine. Rebooted into linux... oops.

Errors - something about something too big, overlapping sectors, etc. Not good.

Boot to Knoppix CD, run lilo a few times, it claimed to have fixed things in lilo, so reboot to linux again, this time it worked.

Boot to knoppix to continue the custom cd building, it doesn't report the extra room - still reports the old partition sizes. Ouch. Fdisk shows the new ones, but df -k shows the old sizes. I am at a loss as to why, as when I boot to linux it works fine. Oh well, keep going.

The build worked fine this time, so I now rebuild the md5sums file and then construct the iso image from the resulting master file structure. Ran out of room creating the ISO file. *sigh* Time to get draconic. I delete /opt /usr /var /bin and a few more folders from the HD - destroying my installed linux, but creating some room. NOW try to create the ISO again.