1394 disk as boot device

On 20 Oct, David Favro was:
> [...] wondering if
> anyone knows whether I can boot from a firewire disk. I have an IBM-PC
> compatible that is already running Windows, I don't want to repartition that
> drive, and I don't have room for another internal, so I'm thinking of hooking a
> LaCie firewire external to it and installing Linux on that, [...]

The firmware of Apple Macintosh computers can boot from Firewire
disks. The BIOSes of IBM compatibles cannot. Or at least I heard
of no such BIOS yet.

As a workaround, you could shrink one of the existing
partitions a bit and install kernel and an initial RAM disk
(initrd) in a new partition. Some newer Linux OS distributions
come with tools that can resize even NTFS partitions. Or you
could put kernel and initrd on a bootable CD. The rest of the
Linux installation can then reside on the Firewire disk.

The initrd would be needed to set up a minimal system that is
able to load sbp2 and perhaps other modular drivers, attach the
Firewire disk to the scsi subsystem, mount the partition, and
then exchange the initrd root filesystem by the root filesystem
on the Firewire disk. Some people did that already, and with some
deeper searching you might even find their posts to this list in
the archive at sf.net or here:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux1394-user

That said, Knoppix might be a better start, provided your PC can
boot from a CD-ROM drive. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/

-- 
Stefan Richter
-=====-=--== =-=- =-=-=
http://arcgraph.de/sr/
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