Text 7906, 73 rader
Skriven 2006-11-11 03:32:44 av Maurice Kinal (1:140/13.1)
   Kommentar till text 7904 av James Bradley (1:134/77.0)
Ärende: ttylinux
================
Hey James!

Nov 10 18:57 06, James Bradley wrote to Maurice Kinal:

 JB> Again, with the language issue. If I have a USB memory device in a 
 JB> USB port, if it has an OS in the BR or not, the board tries to boot 
 JB> from it, and will not move to the next device.

That only happens if the bios recognizes it as a possible bootable device.  If
usb isn't boot possible, regardless of whether or not usb actually works, then
it won't boot no matter if there is a device/drive on that interface that is
indeed bootable.  This is the bios' responsibility.  I have run across a few
boards where the bios claimed it could boot from usb and it couldn't and the
default boot device always worked, usually /dev/hda1 (in my particular case). 
I could still later mount usb devices and make them bootable, or not if I
didn't want them to be, so in those cases I could still use those machines to
hot swap ide drives and create bootable systems for target machines meant to
boot /dev/hda1 once it was wired into the target machine thus effectively
eliminating the need for floppy, CD or DVD installs.  I also could make compact
flash disks bootable for systems that recognized compact flash disks as ide
drives.  I used to use pcmcia for that purpose pre usb days.  Now I have system
that can boot anything on a usb interface, including ide drives, compact flash
disks, and the usb pendrives (or whatever you wish to call those), so now it is
that much more useful as I can still hotswap from those interfaces once the
ramdisk on those interfaces is loaded into ram space.  A very powerful and
cheap way to do this.  However it makes no difference if usb is actually
bootable as the same idea applies.  

 JB> The kicker is, while leafing through the dox, I noticed a [F11] boot 
 JB> key, to preempt the boot sequence in NVRAM. ...And no, still no 
 JB> mention of USB in the grand scheme.

No matter.  My scheme will still work just fine.

 JB> Then you made me think, it may not be "Passive" as A) It does posses 
 JB> a device number, B) It will allow the server to run at all times 
 JB> while replacing a RAID volume. I just remembered the two letters "B" 
 JB> and "P" fly by on the bootup, and forgot the order they were 
 JB> displayed.

I am not sure.  I'd have to see that in action.  I've never really had a use
for raid even when I had/have raid capabilities.  I can't think of any good
reason for it, or at least as raid applies to what I do.

 JB> I think they will not take the latest, greatest OS from Mac, so I may 
 JB> have to sell it to the neighbour kid. Sure glad he's well employed to 
 JB> fuel my experiments. <G>

Yeah that would help.  I could use one of those.  :-)

 JB> A cousin, in Edmonton turned his nose up at my Uncles attempt to drop 
 JB> a PC on his desk, so for $5, I'll either use it as a tire chuck, or 
 JB> run up to Edmonton with it when he borrows the jack-hammer.

Sounds like a plan.

 JB> FWLIK, it's now called Mandriva. Mandrake 10.0 was such a debacle, 
 JB> they descided to roll back the version number to "One."

Ah!  I forgot about that.  Haven't heard much about Mandriva either.

 JB> If you could scale their tower, and hang your own homebaked 
 JB> transmitter and horn off to one side... Just make 'em compact, and a 
 JB> different frequency, and I doubt they'd notice.

Probably not but I am no monkey and wasn't planning on doing anything of that
nature.  Maybe the neighbour.  :-)

Life is good,
Maurice

--- Msged/LNX 6.2.0
 * Origin: The Pointy Stick Society XXV - Almost there (1:140/13.1)