David Campbell (campbell@torque.net)
Sun, 13 Sep 1998 10:12:04 +0800
> As far as booting directly from the EzFlyer, no, I don't believe that this
> is possible.
At the risk of preventing this mail thread dying a natural death:
For a bootable device the following must hold true:
a) BIOS level support must exist for the device interface
b) The BIOS support must place hooks into INT13
Practically ALL parallel port devices fail item "a" since the code to
access the device is not available.
The only device that passes item "a" that I know of is the "ZIP Plus"
only because it can plug onto a SCSI card (hence this is cheating :-)
Just because the interface has BIOS support does not mean it can
boot from it. An example of this is some SCSI cards will only boot
devices set at ID=0, the "external SCSI" ZIP drives can only use IDs
5 or 6.
If someone is feeling insane I am more than happy to help them
code up the BIOS level support for the parallel port ZIP drive.
Most network cards have a slot for a boot prom, in theory there
is nothing preventing(*) this being used for "other purposes"
such as booting from a parallel port device.
David Campbell
PS: Grant, I will be freeing myself up for some serious kernel
hacking.
(*) Some network cards impose an 8/16k window, therefore a
reduced driver only supporting SPP may be required.
=======================================================
campbell@torque.net
"There is no such thing as a bug in the Linux 2.1.x kernels
Consider it as a request from the enlightened for you to brush
up on your C programming and help improve the kernel."
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Wed 30 Dec 1998 - 10:18:17 EST