[ale] making a usb thumb drive bootable from a dvd install disk

[Geoffrey]

Jeff Lightner wrote:
> Not sure what you mean by "no BIOS" but I'm not familiar with Mac.
> Maybe they call it "firmware" or something else but I'm talking about
> what the hardware uses to initialize itself and its devices BEFORE the
> OS.

The Mac uses something called eflt.  There's an add-on called feflt that 
allows you to boot multiple OS's.

> Also I think the links Mike posted earlier were specifically for your
> USB thumb drive.   My post was asking if your original problem (DVD
> won't boot) was possibly because the DVD itself was also USB.  It was
> the USB DVD question I was asking about as that is what had been
> discussed at AUUG.

The DVD is definitely not usb.  As noted it booted and installed Fedora 
8 just fine and Fedora sees it as ide device.  Although, I believe it's 
doing the scsi emulation, but I think Red Hat 5 does that as well.

> But my main point was that "booting from the DVD" is done by whatever
> initializes the hardware be that bios, firmware or black magic.
> However, AFTER that boot has been done what is occurring is Linux is
> creating an install ramdisk to do everything else from.   It is this
> ramdisk that is having the issue.   In my case it was specifically
> because the ramdisk doesn't have the USB drivers that would allow it to
> recognize the DVD.

Well, it's ide, and it's recognized in that manner.  Fedora 8 played 
just fine with it.  Fedora 8 also has a later kernel.

> 
> I had posted that question last month and noted I had seen the same
> behavior on a system that booted from a Fedora Core 4 CD but its ramdisk
> didn't see the CD - the fix for that was to tell it not to use dma for
> ide but the basic problem was what I described above.  i.e The hardware
> boots the disk but the Linux ramdisk doesn't have what it needs to
> recognize it.

I tried nodma, no go. :(

> 
> It does NOT matter whether the initial boot works - the issue is what
> happens when the Linux ramdisk takes over.  You are likely missing
> drivers or configuration options as noted in my DVD and CD issues.

Good point.  I was trying to figure out what Fedora was doing that Red 
Hat wasn't.  More research yet to do.

-- 
Until later, Geoffrey

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
  - Benjamin Franklin