On Mon, Dec 17, 2007 at 09:42:06PM -0800, Al Tobey wrote:
I've had good luck with installing to hard drives connected via a USB adapter to another computer that has a CDROM. Pick up a laptop IDE to USB adapter for around $30.00 and hook it up to a desktop with USB & CDROM with its drives disconnected to prevent accidents. You have to know the right files to edit to get the drivers straightened back out on some distributions, but it's a lot easier these days than it used to be.
Beware that most of the isolated IDE to USB adaptors have real annoying problems, like silently corrupting the data that you write to them. I'd love to use one of these devices, but I have yet to find one that can write several GB of data without changing the data as its written. Reading the usb mass-storage mailing list, it seems that they usually just don't bother checking the USB checksum. Instead of retransmitting a bad packet, they just write the corrupt data. I haven't had any problems with enclosures with drives in them, just with the bare adaptors. Dave -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
