livecds in the future

[Peter Jones]

On 11/24/2009 04:25 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-11-24 at 16:17 -0500, Peter Jones wrote:
>> On 11/24/2009 04:07 PM, Sir Gallantmon wrote:
>>
>>> If there are systems that cannot boot to USB, why not offer a boot disc that
>>> would automatically search for USB drives, offer a list of bootable USB
>>> drives, and allow the user to select one to boot from?
>>
>> Not that I actually believe in these systems that are i686 or newer and won't
>> boot off of usb-storage devices, but if they were to exist, you wouldn't be
>> able to do what you're saying on them.
>>
>> When the bootloader is running, it can only see devices BIOS provides to it.  If
>> a system can't boot off of a usb-storage device, it's because the BIOS isn't
>> enumerating it.  So it's not a case of "we can start from another device and
>> then look at the device we meant to be using" - you can't see the device at all,
>> regardless of your starting point.
> 
> Mandriva Flash - Mandriva's commercial system-on-a-USB-stick thingy -
> does exactly what you confidently proclaim to be impossible. It comes
> with a CD ISO you can burn onto a CD (or mini-CD) that allows you to
> 'chain-boot' the Flash on systems with crappy BIOSes that can't boot
> from a USB stick (yes, they exist, but are getting progressively rarer,
> obviously).

I don't suppose you can easily fish out a url for the source to this?  I'd like
to see what they're actually doing.

-- 
        Peter

I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record.