You said you wanted to prevent users from finding a workaround.
You really need to make up your mind.
Sorry, I didn't fully explain myself in this thread. I am developing a forensic edition of TinyCore. I have remastered it already, changing mount options in rebuildfstab. The goal is to prevent TC from mounting storage devices read/write by default. However, tc-options was still mounting partitions rw that had a /tce folder in the root. I wanted to change this
default behavior, forcing users to expilicity choose a save partition if that is desired rather than explicitly avoid the mounting and searching behavior.
The remaster will have forensic tools not in the repository, but I will build the extensions and submit them as I go. I'd prefer to have the modules outside the rootfs for easy updating without the need to decompress/recompress tinycore.gz. Thus they need to be in /tce.
My current modification to tc-setup worked, just unexpectedly (though I should have anticipated it) didn't discover and mount the /tce directory in my iso. I can explicitly call it as a boot option, but the users of my iso are unskilled in Linux and this is not my first preference.
I can build the modules into the rootfs and configure TC to find them there, which might be my best option, or I can change the detection to mount read-only since I don't expect the users of this specialty iso to make persistent changes.
I'll continue to explore the issue, but I thank you for you interest and suggestions.