On Thu, 5 Apr 2007 18:46:44 +0200 "Tijnema !" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Somehow i even needed to mount /dev/sda to get the first(and only) > partition on my USB stick. It's just like a hard drive. You've got to run fdisk on it: fdisk /dev/sda and create a single ext2 primary partition. Then, after formatting it: mke2fs -v -L volume_label /dev/sda1 you can access it as /dev/sda1. The LS120/Zip drives were the same way - sometimes people would just format the whole disk (/dev/hdc), other times they would partition it (/dec/hdc1). On more modern machines, the BIOS supports booting directly to USB. However, this may require a USB drive that provides "USB-ZIP" or "USB-HDD" boot support. Only about 30% of flash drives have such support: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/flash2005.ars/2 also note: http://syslinux.zytor.com/usbkey.php If your BIOS allows you to boot directly to your USB drive, then that would be the way to go. If booting from BIOS requires such features as seems to be the case, that is so bogus. IMHO, they never did properly address the BIOS boot architecture. In my opinion, every motherboard should have come with an internal non-volatile memory (which today could be a slot for an SD card) right from the earliest days when 1MB flash became affordable - the contents of which can be saved/loaded and used as a device to hold a boot loader. That is, every motherboard needs to have a standardized boot device we can always count on, which is large enough to hold the needed boot loader .... I know, I know, it's called a hard drive, but these guys can get into trouble and need to be externally "rescued". Sigh. I just don't like the situation where we have all of these devices that the BIOS doesn't directly support, and have no easy way to jettison the BIOS entirely with a full OS (Linux) which can then be used as a platform to boot all the other OSes. I think the LinuxBIOS project is a good approach: http://linuxbios.org/ however, there is always the issue of whether a given motherboard is supported. However, I've never done a case where a small kernel is booted from a floppy (or CD for that matter) so as to gain access to the needed USB drivers, and then a second, larger, kernel is invoked from the USB drive. I don't know the ways this can be done. One is via kexec, but it looks tricky: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-kexec.html It would be nice if someone could could go over the various approaches to booting a larger kernel (on a USB drive) from a small initial kernel (on a floppy or CD). Mike Shell -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
