Ian said... > > The biggest drama with booting to a Linux OS on a HDD is that not all of > > the boards under LinuxBIOS have their IDE hardware initialized properly > > (since quite a few people here run solely from the DoC in the BIOS > > socket) -- the upshot of this is that you can have a running multiuser > > system in 3seconds, but no harddrive(s) to play with ;-)
From: Peter Lister > Do the problems apply to solid state IDE? e.g. > <http://www.web-tronics.com/webtronics/ideflasdison.html>. It's not > clear to me whether the problems are due to the spin-up time of the > hardware or other IDE initialisation details. This solution is a shade expensive compared to something more mass market (like CompactFlash cards). Doesn't much matter if you're doing only one. Otherwise better to hook into an existing market. For what it's worth - I distinctly remember the need to allow for hard disk spin up in bootstrap code. This was for a Western Digital WD1000 hard disk controller board (a direct ancestor to IDE). Wrote bootstraps, drivers and diagnostics for that board. This was also twenty years ago when working at Western Digital :).
