This or its tape equivalent has been pretty much how UNIX installation has been done since time immemorial:
1. Your bootstrap ROM boots the system from a file on floppy, tape, or file server.
2. That file is either a second-stage bootstrap with more features that repeats this process, or an installation kernel that has support for a minimum/guaranteed system configuration.
3. You boot that kernel, and tell it where your installation root is (floppy, tape, file server), and it uses that to run the installer.
4. The installer walks you through partitioning and copies a miniroot to your swap partition, and reboots to that.
5. The booted miniroot completes the installation, whether prompting or using information stored to the miniroot from the previous step, and reboots.
6. At this point you may have more config to do since you’re running the “real” system. Some UNIX systems had fancy automatic configuration that would detect what devices you had beyond the minimum and rebuild your kernel with the appropriate drivers and tuning parameters, create the /dev nodes, and so on, and then reboot one more time to a “complete” system.
7. Done! Now is the time for the system administrator to back this all up, so all they need to do in the future is use the installer to partition and restore the contents of the partitions from a backup instead of distribution media.
1. Your bootstrap ROM boots the system from a file on floppy, tape, or file server.
2. That file is either a second-stage bootstrap with more features that repeats this process, or an installation kernel that has support for a minimum/guaranteed system configuration.
3. You boot that kernel, and tell it where your installation root is (floppy, tape, file server), and it uses that to run the installer.
4. The installer walks you through partitioning and copies a miniroot to your swap partition, and reboots to that.
5. The booted miniroot completes the installation, whether prompting or using information stored to the miniroot from the previous step, and reboots.
6. At this point you may have more config to do since you’re running the “real” system. Some UNIX systems had fancy automatic configuration that would detect what devices you had beyond the minimum and rebuild your kernel with the appropriate drivers and tuning parameters, create the /dev nodes, and so on, and then reboot one more time to a “complete” system.
7. Done! Now is the time for the system administrator to back this all up, so all they need to do in the future is use the installer to partition and restore the contents of the partitions from a backup instead of distribution media.