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From: nils@guru.stgt.sub.org (Cornelis van der Laan)
Subject: Re: [Announcement] 386BSD Release 1.0
In-Reply-To: aph@oclc.org's message of 6 May 1994 17:54:10 -0400
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References: <2q63q2$927@dearg.cuillin.org.uk> <wright.86.000DC700@lims01.lerc.nasa.gov>
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<2qeea2$j37@oclc.org>
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Organization: Mehr Anarchie !
Date: Sun, 8 May 1994 23:03:45 GMT
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Reply-To: nils@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
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In article <2qeea2$j37@oclc.org> aph@oclc.org (Andrew Houghton) writes:
Jean Cyr (jcyr@bnr.ca) wrote:
: Can't be done. The initial boot stage (reading the boot sector and jumping to it)
: is handled by your machine's BIOS rom. Currently all BIOS that I've seen look
: for boot sectors on floppy and hard disk. They never look for CD. How could they ?
: There's no BIOS support for CD.
Yes it can. Everyone's BIOS, from an IBM XT on up, goes thru the ROM
address space looking for a specific signature at every 4K or 8K (I
forget which) address boundry between C0000-D0000.
Sure, but then, you have to map your disk drive[s] to SCSI-IDs > 0,
which means that you not only have to _physically_ change the ID's but
also have to install from CD onto a harddrive that is not a boot drive.
This often is very confusing for the install programs I know and they
refuse to work. (Doing diagnostics of a non boot disk with a CDROM
booted OS should be OK on the other hand, although I saw limitations to
IDs 0 and 1 due to missing device files or bad kernel configurations
in some cases.)
Better would be, if the Adapter BIOS start implementing booting of a
CDROM at all, to enable a search algorithm as well that says: if
there's a CD at 6, try to boot from it.
Nils
--
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Cornelis van der Laan -- nils@ims.uni-stuttgart.de
-- nils@guru.stgt.sub.org
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