Hello, I am building firewall systems using the new VIA Mini-ITX form factor motherboard which has a whole PC including an ethernet port on a 7" x 7" board. This is working really great with Debian Linux, with one little problem. There is no floppy port on the board.
The Award bios has lots of boot choices, including booting from a USB floppy. The board does have two USB ports. It will also boot a CD, but I want somethng to do maintenance on a box that won't boot the hard disk, without taking the box apart. A CD drive will not be part of the final package. So, I went out and bought a Teac USB floppy drive today and gave it a try. It boots a 1.44 mb Win98 boot floppy fine. However, tomsrtbt 1.7.218 stops after LIL-. Also, my "parted" (partition edit) boot floppy starts to boot, but partway through says "invalid compressed format". My questions: 1. Does anyone make a USB floppy drive that will boot floppys that are not 1.44 mb DOS format? 2. Has anyone created a version of tomsrtbt that will boot off a USB floppy drive? 3. Can anyone suggest a way to make this work? I searched the wiki, but didn't see anything there. Thanks! Denny Fox
