Subject: booting from USB drives
To: None <port-i386@netbsd.org>
From: Michael Richardson <mcr@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca>
List: port-i386
Date: 02/14/2003 12:50:47
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With the advent of USB keychain drives that are relatively large, it becomes
possible to carry an entire system around with me.
This has nice possibilities when it comes to being able to take a pager/cell
emergency, while loose... drop by an Internet cafe or a friend's place and
boot a real OS. NetBSD (and *BSD) is particularly suited to it, because
we don't screw around with modules and way-too-big GUIs, etc..
Some problems that I forsee:
1) not every system out there will boot from USB, and of those
that will, it may be restricted in the BIOS.
2) how can we combine something like our CD 2.8MB boot strap,
with other data (e.g. an SSH key!) that I might want on the chain?
The tar file system seems like the right trick to me.
Ideally, it is left as a DOS format partition, with something like
"dosboot.com". Something like, because I'd like to have a program that
did the right thing on WinXP (given administrator priviledges). It should
really load the entire 32Mb (say) of the USB drive into a ramdisk *before*
it boots the kernel.
The run live-from-CD stuff that was done is what I'm after, really.
Thoughts?
] ON HUMILITY: to err is human. To moo, bovine. | firewalls [
] Michael Richardson, Sandelman Software Works, Ottawa, ON |net architect[
] mcr@sandelman.ottawa.on.ca http://www.sandelman.ottawa.on.ca/ |device driver[
] panic("Just another Debian GNU/Linux using, kernel hacking, security guy"); [
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