[ale] fake usb drive

[Jim Kinney]

I'm doing a similar process with an existing non-customized DVD and
the kickstart file on usb. But there's a pile of custom code that also
needs to get loaded plus a followup script process for post install
configuration. I have a 4GB usb and it won't all fit. I may be making
a run to MicroCenter and get an 8GB version but I'm scheduled up
through Wednesday.

I'm going to dig around my piles of stuff and see if I can find a DVD
burner I can put in an external case for a day or so.


Hmm. I _do_ have an external drive box and a 10G laptop drive... It's
slower than a DVD drive but very rewriteable.

On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 5:18 PM, JK<jknapka at kneuro.net> wrote:
> Why not boot from a USB flash drive, for test purposes?  Would that
> be way too different than booting from a USB DVD drive?
>
> -- JK
>
> Jim Kinney wrote:
>> That's the process I was envisioning (not the escaping smoke part!).
>> Of course my laptop drive is just not going to work like that...
>>
>> Thanks, Brian. Looks like I'll be burning DVD's now. :-(
>>
>> Hopefully I have to burn only a couple to hammer down the rest of the details.
>>
>> On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Brian Pitts<brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
>>> Jim Kinney wrote:
>>>> I want to test an installation process on specific hardware. I would
>>>> like to do this without burning a g'zillion DVD's.
>>>>
>>>> Ideally, I would like to have the DVD.iso on my laptop be seen by the
>>>> real hardware as a USB DVD drive. My gut instinct is that buring DVD's
>>>> will be faster than trying to create a fake chunk of hardware. But my
>>>> laptop has no DVD burner so I must use one from elsewhere
>>>> (non-portable) and come back to the real machine with a warm disk.
>>>>
>>>> Any ideas how to send "Hi! I'm a DVD drive" fake data down the USB
>>>> cable when probed by BIOS? Then how to go about having the iso be "in
>>>> the drive".
>>>>
>>> Is this going to be safe?
>>>
>>> Your laptop obviously runs the USB port as host
>>>
>>> If you can hook a USB drive up to the specific hardware, it must run the
>>> port as host as well.
>>>
>>> This means electricity is being sent by both ends. I'm not an expert on
>>> these things, but that sounds like a situation where the magic smoke
>>> escapes.
>>>
>>> If your laptop hardware has support for switching USB to device mode,
>>> and if it's in the list of supported hardware here [0], then you can use
>>>  the the File-backed Storage Gadget [1] to export a file fronm your
>>> laptop as if it was a usb mass storage device.
>>>
>>> [0] http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/
>>> [1] http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/file_storage.html
>>>
>>> --
>>> All the best,
>>> Brian Pitts
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Ale mailing list
>>> Ale at ale.org
>>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> A closed mouth gathers no feet.
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>



-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
Actively in pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness