Re: The future of Diskette bootstraps

From: Japheth Cleaver (cleaver_at_ixpres.net)
Date: 05/18/04

  • Next message: John Thompson: "Re: FC2 BitTorrent URL's" 
    Date: Mon, 17 May 2004 17:39:59 -0700
To: Fedora Core releases <fedora-list@redhat.com>

    At 02:59 PM 5/17/2004, Pedro wrote:
    >Guy Fraser wrote:
    >
    >>I would presume that boot floppies should be around for a little while
    >>longer but floppies are too small to be used much longer.
    >>
    >>I have been noticing more and more computers being sold that don't come
    >>with floppy drives anymore. I'm not just talking about Mac's either. We
    >>have a bunch of little machines we use for single purpose servers, and
    >>they don't come with a floppy or CD, so we hookup a CD to get the install
    >>started and do a network install.
    >>
    >>Good luck.
    >
    >Two possibilities:
    >1 - some machines have support to network boot. Maybe try this?
    >2 - I dont know if Fedora Core 2 will have it , but during test , a
    >pendrive image was released , so you could boot from USB..
    >
    >--
    >Pedro Macedo

    I too lamented the loss of floppy kickstart boots in FC2. We have a large
    number of small Micro-ATX boxes purchased sans floppy or CD drives. The
    original plan was to cart a USB floppy around when needed, since USB CD-ROM
    drives are bulkier than we'd like. Also, we have 2 NICs in each one and
    were having problems kickstarting over HTTP, so we needed local writable
    storage.

    However, after using the USB "pen drive" image in FC2T3, I'm fine leaving
    floppies in the dust. A USB dongle is fast(er than a floppy), simple, has
    no external power supply, cheap, and allows plenty of storage for local
    kickstart images, ssh keys, or anything else in a kickstart script you
    don't want to pull from the network.

    Fry's sells 16 MB Lexar USB JumpDrives for about $10. We've got one dongle
    for each type of kickstart script we run, each a different iMac-inspired
    color so we can tell them apart.

    Our Biostar M7VIZ boards see the pen drive as a USB-ZIP for boot purposes,
    but that's a small price to pay.

    Hope this helps,

    Japheth Cleaver
    cleaver@ixpres.net 

    -- 
fedora-list mailing list
fedora-list@redhat.com
To unsubscribe: http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list
  • Next message: John Thompson: "Re: FC2 BitTorrent URL's"

    Relevant Pages

    • Re: USB Floppy drive
      ... I researched the DOMINATOR External USB Floppy Drive ... simple USB devices, like flash drives. ... instructions do not say to load drivers off the CD for XP systems. ...
      (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
    • Re: Yee-Haa!! 5.25-inch USB floppy!
      ... a 5.25" floppy to USB interface. ... I need to be able to move a floppy drive between many machines ... Box with N many drives, likely two to satisfy the various drive ... the firmware needs to handle all possible FDC formats. ...
      (comp.os.cpm)
    • Re: Yee-Haa!! 5.25-inch USB floppy!
      ... The horrible fact of life is that current PCs FDC and floppy are ... fit with 4GB thumb drives and the like. ... When does USB go poof like the floppy? ... My choice would be to find some system to copy all the disks over ...
      (comp.os.cpm)
    • Re: How can I flash the Bios with out a flopy drive?
      ... so buy a floppy drive cheapskate. ... absolute minimum of code to boot from a floppy and, maybe, display ... That whole area of USB bootability is somewhat fraught, ... but there are several approaches as to how you make such drives ...
      (uk.comp.homebuilt)
    • Re: how to reformat floppies that have data on them
      ... The problem could well be the floppies. ... I have also had luck with erasing the floppy with a bulk ... tape eraser before formatting them. ... Saying that though, mainframes used to use tape drives for data storage, but were in very clean environments, and backups are still made onto tape, so it's not necessarily the media, just the darned floppy discs. ...
      (Fedora)