#1: boot from USB memory
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Reporter: jjp3 | Owner: parasytic
Type: enhancement | Status: assigned
Priority: major | Milestone: 4.9
Component: bootdisk | Version:
Keywords: |
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Changes (by parasytic):
* milestone: => 4.9
Comment:
This is just about done.
I decided to use the fdisk implementation in busybox, rather than building
sfdisk from the utils-linux-ng package. Overall, this change will
increase the busybox executable size by about 10KB (compared to an
additional 55KB if sfdisk is added).
The patch removes EDD, replacing the heads/sectors info gathering with
fdisk. While I was at it, I also changed the partition_table() function
in install.pl to use fdisk -l on linux, because the partition dump made by
parted is ugly (IMO).
When multiple disks are present, linuxboot will now explicitly ask which
disk to install to. I was able to collect vendor and model information on
available disks, along with calculating the size, so it's at least a
reasonable menu. Here's an example of what I get on one of my systems:
More than one suitable boot device found. Please choose one:
1) /dev/sda (160 GB) ATA WDC WD1600AAJS-7
2) /dev/sdb (513 MB) USB Flash Memory
3) /dev/sr0 (493 MB) HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-H73N
Select: [123]
Note that I copied this from my daily driver, not from a linuxboot
session. Under linuxboot, the flash drive and CD drive are not included,
probably due to the way PCI/SCSI modules are loaded by the master script.
Sadly, the patch duplicates some code that's already on the network share.
Mainly, the choice() implementation and its dependent functions. It would
be nice if some of those functions were separated out to a Perl module. ;)
Finally, I also wrote a script (Bash script ... not sure how well it will
work under other shells ... and not a Perl script, like the others under
tools/) that can install linuxboot to a flash drive. An installation
example:
$ cd linuxboot
$ make download flashboot
$ sudo ./tools/install-flashboot.sh /dev/sdb
The shell script does all kinds of magic, like partitioning and formatting
the device, installing an MBR, syslinux, and copying the boot files.
I'll post my patches when the patches in Tickets #29 and #30 are comitted
to SVN, so that it will be easier for me to manage which of my
modifications belong to this bug. (Maybe mercurial-queues can help me
here? I'm already managing my local repo under mercurial, thanks to
hgsvn) I'll be looking for some peer-review on this one!
--
Ticket URL: <http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/unattended/ticket/1#comment:3>
Unattended <https://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/unattended/>
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