On 4/5/07, Michael Shell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > 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
I did above steps, and in a fully working environment i was mounting /dev/sda1, but using a floppy disk from other distribution it required me to mount /dev/sda, and /dev/sda1 didn't work. > > 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 I know that some BIOSes to this, but this is a school project, and these PCs are quite old. Here at home i have 3 test PCs for this project. 1 is about 10-15 yrs old, one is about 5-10 yrs old, which both don't support USB booting, and i have another PC here, which is only a few months old, and USB booting is fine, but at school it doesn't work, and so i want to use a floppy for this instead. > > > 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. I'll take a look at it :) > > 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 I didn't want to reload the kernel, i just wanted to load additional modules after mounting the USB stick. Anyway, thank you for your reply, some good links :) Tijnema > -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
