Hey Andy!

Jan 01 11:35 07, Andy Ball wrote to Maurice Kinal:

 AB> I experimented recently with bootable JumpDrive and Zip disk but I 
 AB> think the firmware was just too old on the machines that I was 
 AB> working with that day.

That was the same situation here until this past summer.  I could get
compact flash disks to boot off an ide adapter on all sorts of machines -
especially good on ye ol' 486's - and more recently with flash disks that
plug directly into an ide interface on a motherboard.  Matter of fact, this
is the first boot off such a drive - M-System's iDOC 64M - on the new
PGA775 Intel board I managed to liberate.  This is what shows regarding the
disk;

    Probing IDE interface ide0...
    hda: M-Systems iDOC V1.01 030804, ATA DISK drive
    ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
    hda: max request size: 128KiB
    hda: 128128 sectors (65 MB) w/0KiB Cache, CHS=1001/4/32
    hda: cache flushes not supported
     hda: hda1

    Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
    /dev/ramdisk             35692     31232      2617  92% /


I have a pure 64-bit initrd on there mounting on /dev/ram0 which makes it
run like a screaming demon once it has loaded.  The exact same initrd is on
a USB flash disk and takes a helluva lot longer to load but runs as fast
once it is in ramspace.  As shown above it fits into a 36M space.  I have
ones that are less but they aren't nearly as mean as this one is.  /home is
currently a mounted sata drive partition as well as a chrootable
development system.  I need to install a 32-bit cross compiler on there
which is penciled in for tomorrow.

Awesome way to do this.


 AB> I have booted more recent ones from USB 
 AB> CD-ROM.  Frustratingly even though the boards come with FireWire 
 AB> ports, I couldn't boot from a FireWire drive.

I've had problems with USB CD-ROMs in the past but I think this box should
handle it.  Am planning to try a DVD-ROM later and see if that works.  No
Firewire ... yet.  I saw a Firewire TV tuner that caught my eye but way too
much money, or at least more money then I am willing to part with just for
TV.  I have some ideas for it though, beyond TV, so maybe someday.

 AB> My most recent install (NetBSD 3.1) was done by putting the bare 
 AB> minimum of install sets on an ffs-format Zip disk along with an 
 AB> install kernel.

I did that with Slackware quite a few years ago.  Worked pretty good, far
better then floppies that is for sure.

 AB> Since the target machine had NetBSD 2.1 on it, I 
 AB> just copied the install kernel to /, booted into it, repartitioned 
 AB> the drive and installed using the zip disk as source media. Later I 
 AB> removed all files from the zip disk, used it to 'sneakernet' the 
 AB> remaining install sets over to the new machine and unpacked them 
 AB> manually.

Great idea.

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.2.0