Return to BSD News archive
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!news.unimelb.EDU.AU!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.bbnplanet.com!cam-news-hub1.bbnplanet.com!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Re: how can I boot from "live CDROM"? Date: 26 Dec 1996 20:06:39 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 47 Message-ID: <59ulsf$nr6@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <32BECE33.15FB@math.tau.ac.il> <59ofu8$brm@uriah.heep.sax.de> <32C1A0F0.212B@math.tau.ac.il> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33205 Shimon Pozin <pozin@math.tau.ac.il> wrote: > > > Can anybody tell me how can I boot from "live CDROM"? > > > > You can't. (By now.) > Sorry for stupid question, but could you explain in a few > words why? Very simple: nobody has been bothered enough to write a CD-ROM bootblock yet. It's not very long ago that vendors actually started to ship BIOSes that adhere to the ``El Torito'' bootable CD specs, there was no agreed standard for how to do this before. (And the El Torito stuff contains a lot of junk that is only there to allow booting some obsolete computer programs from a CD, and there's still no agreed standard for how to boot a tape, and and and...) If somebody is _really_ eager to deal with it, i can forward him some personal mail exchange i've got previously for this topic. No, please don't tell me that we should use some braindead wrapper only, and thereby convert our existing bootblocks into a bootable CD. Unlike other people, we've got the source for our bootstrap, and if we will ever have a CD bootstrap, we will prefer to have the source for this one, too. The suggested wrappers are only good for people who don't know how to write a bootstrap at all. (This paragraph will only make some sense for people who have already seen and read the El Torito and related documents on Phoenix' server.) > to know WHAT does FBSD recognize when comes to boot prompt. And what It only accepts a UFS medium by now, where the file to load must reside in the root directory. It's often named /kernel, but it can be named however you like. > does actually show '?' on boot? The contents of the root directory on the default boot device. It's just a reminder which files are there, in case your default /kernel doesn't boot, and you eventually forgot how your /kernel.yesterdayII was actually named. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)