From: corywest@rice.edu (Cory West) Subject: An interesting discovery about boot devices. Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 05:40:40 GMT
I'm not sure if this is common knowledge, but I just
'discovered' it on my own a couple of days ago and I have been
reading this group and all related documentation for a good,
solid six weeks:
If you set the major and minor numbers of your boot
device to 0 0 in the kernel (I did with with a binary editor
at the proper offset), when Linux boots, it _asks_ you what
to use as a boot device. This is handy because if you have a
tiny DOS partition and use BOOT.SYS and BOOTLIN, you can
boot from floppy or hard disk without having two different kernel
image files around.
Anyway, I just thought that was interesting and thought
someone else might find it useful.
P.S. Since there's a way to set or not set your boot device major
and minor numbers, is there also a way to set the default video
mode so that the kernel doesn't ask you what video mode it should
use? That would be handy for a totally autobooting kernel (with
shoelace or something like that) for those infrequent remote reboots.
Cory West, corywest@rice.edu