Linux-kernel mailing list archive 1999-22,: Bootables CDs

# Bootables CDs

Peter Horton (pdh@colonel-panic.com)
Fri, 4 Jun 1999 06:26:45 +0100

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On Fri, Jun 04, 1999 at 01:44:55AM +0100, Riley Williams wrote:
> Hi David.
>
> >> If I could butt in for a second. Linus's solution is not right,
> >> in my humble opinion, but the problem he identifies needs a good
> >> solution better than "not many people have this problem".
>
> > I never meant to give that implication. I object to Linus' claim
> > that these sorts of installations are unsupported because they
> > are too hard to do in the current PCMCIA architecture. It's a
> > simple space issue: adding PCMCIA to an initrd, when you're
> > already committed to the initrd framework, is not rocket
> > science. That doesn't mean it is a non-issue.
>
> Since you appear to at least be willing to discuss the subject,
> perhaps you can answer the question I've asked a number of times
> regarding this, that nobody appears to be willing to answer:
>
> Q> What is so magical about having the CD's boot image being
> Q> a 1440k image when the standard specifies that the boot
> Q> image can also be 2880k in size?
>
> I can confirm that I've checked this out with both the systems I have
> access to that can boot off their CD drives, by burning a CD with a
> 2880k boot image and seeing if they can boot off it. Both booted fine.
>
> However, I realise that a random sample of two computers is not firm
> proof that all such systems would be OK, hence my question...
>

Hi Riley.

Award's 4.51 BIOS definately supports all the boot sizes (including
hard disk image), as does Phoenix's 4.06 BIOS, and any BIOS that can
boot NT CDs can do non-emulation mode boots (loading an arbitrary
number of sectors from an arbitrary position on the CD into RAM).
The only feature in the spec that I can't find support for is the
non-boot emulation image (e.g. the machine boots from C:, but still
maps a CD image to A:). Mind you, the Phoenix BIOS I tested with
reported the sector size of the CD as 512 bytes :-(

P.

    --
    +---------------------------------------------------------------+
    |  Peter Horton     -    software engineer    -     Linux 2.3.5 |
    +---------------------------+-----------------------------------+
    |  pdh@berserk.demon.co.uk  |  http://www.berserk.demon.co.uk   |
    |  pdh@colonel-panic.com    |  http://www.colonel-panic.com     |
    +---------------------------+-----------------------------------+

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