USB / CF tests
Hi, for testing with assorted machines I build a Debian-live USB image
and copy it to CF or usb stick with no modifications.
In my tests it is been used in motherboard CF adapters, IDE to CF
adapters, plain usb sockets and usb CF adapters.
It makes no difference.
I have used it as a rescue disk more than once - the downside of using
root as everyday user when there are potentially destructive scripts
lying around.
What does make a difference is the 'sanity' of the hard drive
configuration. I test with 4 different CF cards and my long sufferring
USB stick. None of the CHS (Cylinder Head Sector) arrangements are the
same on same size disks, and they frequently change to unusable values
when burning images to disk. Often the 'cylinder' value changes to
something like 2134690 (< 1024 is normal) and fsck has problems on boot
(or worse - run time).
My script that formatted using parted has been ditched for sfdisk where
the CHS parameters can be set manually, based on the device being
written to. If anyone wants a copy please let me know. I knew there was
something wrong with the last version as soon as I posted it here -
there was an enduring silence.
David
On Tue, 2009-04-21 at 22:31 +0200, Daniel Baumann wrote:
> Richard Nelson wrote:
> > This was discussed on irc channel the other day and it should work
> > with usb-hdd images.
>
> jup; usb sticks, cf cards, harddisks.. there's no difference at all
> (except for those old 'early-usb booting' machines that only understand
> usb-zip), all use the same (harddisk) geometry.
>
> --
> Address: Daniel Baumann, Burgunderstrasse 3, CH-4562 Biberist
> Email: daniel.baumann@panthera-systems.net
> Internet: http://people.panthera-systems.net/~daniel-baumann/
>
>
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