From: drew@ladymacb.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: back to Bernoulli idea Date: Thu, 29 Apr 1993 01:31:25 GMT
In article <pdhC67yFG.BBw@netcom.com> pdh@netcom.com (P D H) writes:
>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?".
Yes.
>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.
Booting off of a floppy is slower than booting from a hard disk,
but there's nothing wrong or hacked about it. In fact, the Linux
kernel has a small bootstrap program at the begging of it that
will read the kernel off of a raw floppy (ie, no filesystem,
just dd if=Image of=/dev/fd0 or whatever and you have a bootable
floppy)
>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,
If you have a small partition on your IDE drive, just load
your kernels from there with either LILO or shoelace and boot
from the hard disk. Both support multiple kernels, and both
will be faster than booting from floppy.
-- Boycott USL/Novell for their absurd anti-BSDI lawsuit. | Drew Eckhardt Condemn Colorado for Amendment Two. | drew@cs.Colorado.EDU Use Linux, the fast, flexible, and free 386 unix |