USB flash drives [was: RE: Migrating from the Legacy Diskette Drive: Ford Motor Company Case Study]

[Brian Densmore]

No, when devfs creates my USB device it looks like a scsi harddrive.
My USB flash drive shows up as /dev/sda1 and I can make devfs
create a symlink from /dev/sda1 to /dev/hda2 which grub will *see*
as (hda1) and if I put a single partition on it and mount it as /boot
and copy my vmlinuz, etc. on it  and tell grub to boot
(hda1,0)/boot/vmlinuz that is what it will faithfully do. Now, granted
I may still have to put grub on the mbr of the harddisk. Maybe that is
what is confusing you. Neither the BIOS nor grub needs to know 
anything about USB in order to boot from a USB flash drive. Also
I could just tell grub to boot (sd0,0), instead of making the symlink.
I never said I was going to install grub on the USB. Of course I 
could be wrong. I could be putting the cart before the horse. Nothing 
that couldn't be fixed by putting a "USB aware" kernel in firmware, but
of course that would require a custom MB these days. Then again, I have
the source code to grub and could make it "USB aware" (were I so
inclined).

-----Original Message-----
> From: Jason Clinton

> Brian Densmore wrote:

>> I have even had to reload devfs. I have no doubt that
>> I could put a disk in there and create a grub entry and
>> boot from it. hmmmm
  
> Grub (and LILO) is not USB aware. You would have to boot from 
> the BIOS which somehow emmulates a floppy disk. It's similar 
> to the way a bootable CD works. I spent a few days on this several 
> months ago and never got it to work.