The most you can cram on a DD floppy

[mr_a500]

I was wondering if anybody has made any super-packed "emergency boot" floppies - a sort of "all-in-one" disk. I made one a while ago and I managed to get just over 1.5Mb onto one DD floppy - self extracting into RAM. I used lzx maximum compression (and while decompressing, files are listed in a nice font and with fancy copper rainbow background).

It's very strange inserting a floppy and having it automatically load everything into RAM - with no harddrive attached - and then removing the floppy and having a whole OS (WB3.1) complete with filemanager, text editor, binary editor, HD tools, SnoopDOS, jpeg and image viewers, sample player, archive extractor, and other misc. utilities on a completely silent Amiga (not even drive clicking). It even looks good (has Newicons, VisualPrefs, ModePro and copper rainbow).

So is it possible to cram more? Is there a better compression? Keep in mind that the extractor also has to fit on the disk (unlzx is only 21K).

I'd like there to be a contest to see who can make the most amazing DD boot disk. It's not just a useless endeavour - this packed bootdisk has saved my ass on many occasions.

[mr_a500]

@Mr_A500: what spec of Amiga and how much free RAM is required to boot your emergency floppy environment? Just curious!

My bootdisk was made for my A500 with 020, 2Mb Chip and 8Mb Fast. It would probably work fine on any Amiga with 3.0+ ROM and 2Mb+ RAM total. I'd love to share it for people to see how great my bootdisk is, if it wasn't for the annoying legality of it.

I already tried powerpacking all the large executables before adding them to the lzx archive, but surprisingly it made the lzx archive BIGGER. I guess the lzx compression works better on non-powerpacked files. I wouldn't even attempt to use a newer compressor like "RAR" because the unrar executable is a whopping 180K and uses huge stack and RAM to extract.

[mr_a500]

You're surprised? Uh, come on, this is obvious.

What surprised me was how much bigger it was (about 100K - 13% bigger). When you compress other compressed files like .jpeg or other archives (lzx inside lzx,lzx inside lha), they are the same size or only marginally bigger. I have seen some occasions when compressing a compressed file results in a smaller file (only up to 5% smaller).

Hey, good idea - I'll check out other filesystems and tracksizes to see if I can get extra space. It still has to be reliable though. There's no point in having a super-packed bootdisk that doesn't work when I need it.

So... nobody else has fancy bootdisks? (...or is it just that this is 2006 and everybody's using WinUAE?)

[mr_a500]

Unfortunately, almost everything on the disk wouldn't be able to be distributed. The WB 3.1 parts can't and all the Aminet stuff - although free - cannot be distributed without the documentation and the documentation would take up way too much space on the disk. I suppose I could put the bootdisk image into an archive containing all the documentation, but I would still have to leave WB 3.1, Pageliner and DiskSalv off.

I could create a super-duper install that asks you to insert a WB3.1 disk, a disk containing Pageliner and DiskSalv and then it automatically creates a lzx archive matching my bootdisk - and then writes it to a blank disk that you insert.

No, on second thought, I don't feel like doing that. ;-) (maybe if I get extremely bored...)

[mr_a500]

I can do that. I can create a directory listing, include my prefs, fonts, startup-sequences and files that can be distributed. Then whoever wants to create it will have to add the missing files and lzx maximum compress it, then put on disk with the uncompressed startup files. (is anyone interested in this?)

[mr_a500]

Hmm... how about powerpacking everything, executables, datafiles the lot and then have powerpacker.library and powerpackerpatcher take care of all the hazzle?

No, I already tried powerpacking and it is way bigger than a lzx archive. With all files powerpacked, it's still over 1Mb and wouldn't even fit on the disk.

Lzx makes the smallest archives, but I'd love it if somebody could prove me wrong. (with unarchiver <=21K)

I just realized I can include loadmodule and scsi.device 43 (optional startup - pressing F1 at boot) and use my bootdisk to access partitions beyond 4Gb if the boot partion is screwed up. (recover using multiple backups stored beyond 4Gb)

I'm off to create the best single Amiga bootdisk ever seen by human eyes... (only aliens will have seen better :-D)