From: pdh@netcom.com (P D H) Subject: back to Bernoulli idea Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 00:23:39 GMT
I originally asked about using the Bernoulli drive for my Linux system
before I had it installed. That was the planning stage. Anyway the
answers I got suggested that this was a bad choice to me based on the
great difficulty in getting them to boot up (they are SCSI, and my system
is IDE, and the bios and setup were in question).
The question I did NOT ask, that I did not think to ask because of certain
assumptions have I have always made, and that no one suggested that I ask
(or simply answered without the question) was "can I boot from a floppy?".
For those of you used to Linux, this may seem obvious. Since there are
packages like SLS and rootdisk that use floppy, it might seem that the
answer is yes. But back then, my understanding of that suggested to me
that those packages were special hacks and that booting from a floppy
was indeed not a routine thing to do.
In particular, the concept I had was that the boot disk and the root file
system had to be on the same disk. This is (now clearly) not so.
So now I am back to looking at the Bernoulli drives. The configuration
I am considering is to have floppies to boot from for different kernels,
a small DOS and swap and the basic root disk on the hard drive, and have
other filesystems for special stuff like sources on different removable
Bernoulli cartridges. The alternate configuration (which blocked the
idea before) is to have some of the floppy kernels specify a root partition
from the Bernoulli (/dev/sda or /dev/sda0).
The Bernoulli drives use a SCSI interface. My serious question is has
anyone actually used a Bernoulli on a regular basis, particularly as the
root file system booted from floppy (w/o LILO)?
-- | Phil Howard, pdh@netcom.com, KA9WGN Spell protection? "1(911)A1" | | Right wing conservative capitalists are out to separate you from your MONEY | | Left wing liberal do gooders are out to separate you from EVERYTHING ELSE!! | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+