[rescue] Removable boot...was: What to do with those USB "pen" drives...

Mike Hebel nimitz at nimitzbrood.com
Fri Aug 8 23:23:19 CDT 2003


> On Friday, August 8, 2003, at 11:11 PM, Kurt Huhn wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 08 Aug 2003 19:43:25 -0400
>> Al Potter <apotter at spankingnuns.com> wrote:
>>
>>>> I did this in 1998 with a bootable CD and a Zip drive.  It most
>>>> certainly is *not* new.
>>>
>>> OK, now I'm curious.
>>>
>>> WHICH bootable CD, on what system, and how?
>>>
>>
>> All I did was create a bootable CD with some tgzs on it, a home-brew
>> distribution based on (I think) Slackware, and an IBM PS/2 486/DX2-50 
>> -
>> though it would have worked acceptably well on a large selection of 
>> x86
>> boxen.

Hell, with the right system/motherboard bios you can probably run the 
system entirely off of a non-parallel Zip drive. (0)  It would be 
slower than normal but it would run.  You figure 2:1 (best case) 
compression on the Zip-disk and you get approximately 180meg which 
would make a nice simple NetBSD system.  Why you would want to do it 
that way would be another matter entirely.


>> It's really rather easy to do.

Super-easy if you have a SCSI Zip drive and a CD-Rom to install from.

Mike Hebel

(0) You _might_ be able to do a CD/Floppy boot and a parallel Zip 
drive, (in fact I know you can because I can do a parallel CD-Rom 
install of Linux), but it would most likely be too slow to be 
effectively usable except as a print server or something low-usage.

-- 
Medieval Combat anyone? http://www.kingsofchaos.com/page.php?id=694655



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