Re: Extended floppy : summary
On Fri, Feb 23, 2001 at 04:14:00AM -0700, Tim Riker wrote:
> Hey all. The danger IMHO with larger sizes is not booting them it's
> supporting all those that want to make boot floppies from ftp on
> platform X.
>
> We would need procedures (probably binaries) that can format and copy
> the data onto floppies such that the user can get to the first Linux
> boot.
>
> This is non-trivial, as you can imagine.
This needs "only" to depend on fdutils for superformat, and mtools (simply
because superformat needs it).
But the main problem, IMO, is that this kind of stuff is very PC specific.
But as I have already said, booting is firmware dependent...
El Torito is perhaps not that great, but the fact that it is put on an
iso9660 fs, and that it allows to choose between different images to boot
would have made possible, in theory, to have 1 CD for all the architectures
supported. At the moment, El Torito is only supported by PC and PPC, AFAIK.
>
> I suggest we stick with 1.44 as boot for PCs.
>
> We could use a 2.88 image for CD boot. In fact we should as getting to a
> "second virtual floppy" is not readily supported by the "El Torito" CD
> boot spec.
>
> Thierry Laronde wrote:
> >
> > I come back to the subject I have launched.
> >
> > To summarize, we can use more "space" on a high density double sided floppy,
> > by using uncommon format.
> >
> > There are two problems :
> >
> > 1) Because these formats are unusual, the BIOS doesn't automagically
> > recognize them, and try to access them as normal 1.44 Mb floppies -> you
> > need a bootloader to manage the format, and dd'ing Linux can not work
> >
> > 2) There are safe formats (that can be used everywhere, and that are not
> > dangerous for the hardware), and more cutting edges ones. I list only safe
> > ones :
> > - 1680 Kb (21 sectors of 512b) : safe, work with Lilo, could work
> > with a modified GRUB
> > - 1760 Kb (11 sectors of 1Kb) : safe, but at the moment, no
> > bootloader designed for that
> > - Mixed Size Sectors : some safe, but not bootable, the more interesting
> > format is the one derived from 2m, because the first track is a
> > standard one (18 sectors of 512b). So if a stage1_5 can be put
> > here in order to recognize the information and to drive the
> > floppy, 1840 Kb can be used
> >
> > At the moment, at least 1680 Kb can be used. But I will work for some
> > support for 2m with GRUB, allowing 1840 Kb.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > --
> > Thierry LARONDE, Centre de Ressources Informatiques, Archamps - France
> > http://www.cri74.org
> > PingOO, serveur de com sur distribution GNU/Linux: http://www.pingoo.org
> >
> > --
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>
> --
> Tim Riker - http://rikers.org/ - short SIGs! <g>
> All I need to know I could have learned in Kindergarten
> ... if I'd just been paying attention.
>
>
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--
Thierry LARONDE, Centre de Ressources Informatiques, Archamps - France
http://www.cri74.org
PingOO, serveur de com sur distribution GNU/Linux: http://www.pingoo.org
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