Booting Linux from an internal IDE Zip disk?

Christopher Wagner chrisw at pacaids.com
Fri Dec 28 01:13:11 PST 2001



-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Gordon [mailto:gordon at sonoma.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 10:56 PM
To: talk at nblug.org
Subject: Re: Booting Linux from an internal IDE Zip disk?


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:

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.
-
Hmm..  I'd knock on wood after saying that. :)
-
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.
-
Well, if your bios does not support booting from ZIP, then the option is
either to get another IDE controller that will support this.  I think
Promise may have such a thing.   Or to upgrade your motherboard's bios.
--
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.
-
CDs would be faster than ZIPs.  But I understand your point, if the students
can do it themselves, it saves the teacher time, and hopefully they might
learn something in the process (we hope).
--
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.
-
Award makes a bios that supports booting from ZIP drives.  Usually, when you
want to get a new bios, you replace the motherboard to do so, although
conceivably on many motherboards you can replace just the bios, but the
number of boards with removable bios chips are dwindling rapidly.
--
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.
-
Hey, I'd brave a rabid pit bull for a good internal SCSI ZIP drive..
--
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.
-
They may have quantity discounts, and educational discounts.  It might be
worth at least looking into.
http://www.vmware.com/solutions/academic/
--

- Christopher Wagner



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