On a machine with a normal floppy drive (/dev/fd0) it works fine. The kernel boots, then asks for the root disk (second floppy) and that boots and everything is happy.
On my laptop which doesn't have a floppy drive, but a USB external floppy instead, the first disk boots fine, but when it asks for the Root disk, the boot fails. This is because the BIOS emulates the USB floppy as a normall fd0 floppy drive long enough for Linux to boot but after the kernel takes over, the floppy is no longer at fd0 but is emulated as some scsi device in the USB system.
The problem is that depending on what scsi devices and other USB devices you have, it could change from sda, sdb, etc... so there doesn't seem to be any way in advance to know which device the USB floppy will become? With two-disk booting, you have to tell the kernel which device to pull the root disk image from in advance. I want to make a boot disk that will work on any machine since I might not know in advance if the USB floppy will map the sda, sdb, etc... Even if I could guess which SCSI device it will be emulated on, I have heard back in 2001 that people had to hack a delay into the kernel so it has enough time to load the USB driver for the device. Has that been fixed?
Anyone able to do this type of thing on a USB floppy or have any suggestions?
Also, once you plug a USB device into a system running Linux (such as the USB floppy drive or maybe a USB memory stick) is there an easy way to find out which device it was assigned without having to try mounting all the sd? devices before you get the right one?
Thanks in advance, Jeff.
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