Booting Linux from an internal IDE Zip disk?

Richard Gordon gordon at sonoma.edu
Wed Dec 19 22:56:05 PST 2001


I appreciate all the suggestions. I will be pursuing a few of them as soon as I
can find a spare computer at work. Here are a few comments:

1. Not that it matters, but the reason we used SCSI Zip drives originally was
to support Minix, not Linux, and Minix does not support IDE drives. It does,
however, fit entirely within 30 Mbytes, so we could put several Minix images on
one Zip disk. We did not want to use floppies because one of the exercises
students did with Minix was to modify and recompile the kernel and floppies
make the process slower and more cumbersome.

2. We know that our machines are not secure, but we cannot make them secure and
still allow students to do the kinds of exercises we require. The goal,
however, is to eliminate accidental modification of the systems on the hard
disks. Nobody has ever abused the freedome we allow.

3. If we cannot get Linux to work without a floppy then we will use a floppy
for the kernel. It just seems a little neater to avoid the floppy.

4. We probably won't burn CDs. It is something we have to do for the students,
whereas the mechanism using Zips (and floppies) can be done by students using
files we place on our server. Also CDs will be slow even compared to Zip disks,
and we still need the Zip disks for the files students will be creating or
modifying.

5. I plan to test Frank Ball's configuration with the Zip drive as a slave on
the primary IDE controller. I hope that if I can get the Zip to appear as hdb
then it can be booted.

6. Yes, we have "old" PCs with an old BIOS. I have been trying to get my hands
on a newer BIOS, one with support for booting from Zip drives, but so far
without success. Even if I could specify in the BIOS to boot from the Zip drive
I would still have to know the bios number for the drive so that I could put
that into lilo.conf for the root partition.

7. And yes, we are planning for new labs, not replacements of our old PCs.
Fortunately when we bought the PCs for the lab we bought extras for faculty, so
we have a bunch of SCSI Zip drives that we can use as those in the lab break.

8. The VMWare idea seemed interesting until someone noted that it costs money.
Matt Kirk probably had it right when he suggested that it would be too
expensive a solution. If it costs money we probably cannot afford to do it.
Most software, no matter how reasonable in price, becomes expensive when you
have to install it on 20 or 40 or 80 computers.

9. All that said, I would still like to get the Zip disk to boot without a
floppy. Does anyone out there have a BIOS with support for booting a Zip drive?
If so, can you tell me who makes the BIOS and what motherboard came with that
BIOS (and even who made the computers.) Oh yes, and if you have tested it, does
it work?

Richard Gordon



More information about the talk mailing list