On Tue, Jul 23, 2002 at 04:24:59PM -0700, charlie bullen wrote:
> A few months ago I went to a westside plug meeting where there was a demo of 
> installing linux in a windows directory. Is this possible if the disk is 
> formated with ntfs? 

Yes and no.
Although it is possible for Linux to mount the NTFS filesystem as a readonly
device, it does not have enough knowledge about the filesystem to use it as
a root device.

HOWEVER, it may be possible to do such a thing via an initrd script. Eg:

	 1. Linux kernel loads initrd and starts linuxrc
	 2. linuxrc mounts the NTFS partition on /mnt/ntfs
	 3. linuxrc mounts a disk image of the real Linux root located
	    somewhere on the NTFS partition (eg: /mnt/ntfs/linuxroot.img)
	    on /mnt/linuxroot
	 4. linuxrc does a 'pivot_root /mnt/linuxroot /mnt/oldroot' to move the
	    initrd root to /mnt/oldroot, and move /mnt/linuxroot to /.
	 5. linuxrc ends and allows init to continue from the newly remounted
	    root.
	    
Of course, doing this is rather tricky and requires a bit of initrd hacking.
I do not know of any major distribution that would even remotely support
this out of the box. More information about initrd images, etc can be found
in the Linux kernel sources, under linux/Documentation/initrd.txt.

> I also can't remember which distro was used and how it was done so any advice 
> would be appreciated

Although I was not at the meeting, I have had success doing this with only
one distro thus far: Slackware. It works right out of the box on a UMSDOS
"partition", though I'm not sure if this is supported anymore -- it's been
quite some time since I worked with Slackware.

--
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
mondoshawan@tank.dyndns.org
http://tank.dyndns.org:8080