Re: [tlug] Running from USB memory stick (hardware issues)

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Lyle H Saxon writes:

 > It varies from machine to machine, but in one NEC machine I recently used,
 > the BIOS has several USB options - specifically:
 > - USB FDD
 > - USB HDD
 > - USB Memory
 > - USB CC/DVD
 > That in itself seems a little odd to me.  Why isn't there just one USB
 > setting and then the machine can look for something bootable via whatever
 > is plugged in?

Sorry I can't help with the question of what to do.

As for the NEC BIOS, well, at the lowest level, all of those devices
speak USB, but then within the USB protocol they speak various
different protocols.  Then there may be partitions and so on up the
stack.

In practice, NEC is the place where they wrote Linux drivers on
Windows machines.  No Linux workstations at all, one test box.  So my
guess is that they added drivers for the various devices and boot
formats, and didn't bother to add (and test!) detection logic.  Most
users know the difference between a floppy disk and a hard drive, so
letting the user decide might be more reliable.[1]

Steve


Footnotes: 
[1]  I was in the Windows NT 3.5 beta program.  I had an AMI EISA SCSI
host that emulated Buslogic (faster and more reliably than the native
AMI with Windows drivers).  Well, I reported a couple of bugs and was
eventually rewarded with a shiny new CD with the released version of
Windows NT on it.  I put it in, reinstalled, rebooted, and the mofo
wiped my Windows partition.  Turns out that to improve Buslogic
performance they were using undocumented instructions, which the AMI
interpreted as the "reformat partition" command.  So I installed
TurboLinux into the now empty partition (I was already a Debian person
by then, but Scott and Steve insisted I had to try it....) ;-)  Test,
you mofos, test!