[Gllug] Wanted - small (20, 30, 40gb) ide disks for kids' computers

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Thu, 19 Nov 2009, Matthew King wrote:

> Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> writes:
> 
> > On 16 Nov 2009, Peter Childs spake thusly:
> >> I'm guessing a floppy would work too. Its the only purpose I've
> >> found for good old floppies in the last few years!
> >
> > Thankfully the newer machines that don't have floppy drives also
> > don't have BIOSes with this sort of odious bug. (Not one of my
> > current machines has floppies. No problem at all: you can't boot off
> > a floppy these days 'cos the kernel won't fit, and any halfway
> > decent machine has PXE. Hell, one of my machines gives you the
> > choice of PXE or dismantling the machine to swap in a preinstalled
> > drive to boot it for the first time. No floppy drive, no CDROM, no
> > booting from USB.)
> 
> I recall, vaguely, a problem some time ago where a server was
> delivered by HP with a set of Windows installation CDs which couldn't
> run the hard drive. I don't recall why, probably SATA when it was new.
> The drivers were shipped on a floppy disc, which I dutifully tried to
> insert at the appropriate time, only to discover that the machine
> didn't come with a floppy drive and didn't even have a connector on
> the motherboard for one.
> 
> I can't remember how we got the system up and running in the end but I
> remember I didn't end up with much sleep that night before I woke up
> at $dark the next day (Saturday!) to take it to Acton and connect it.

At the BBC the Unix team built everything from their desks, via serial
consoles and netbooting, but occasionally we'd need to venture down to
the datacentre, where we'd see the Windows engineers in coats installing
by cdrom.

I recognised the fonts, mouse pointer and general widgets of the install
GUI one of them was using before it got to the main Windows booting and
installing.  It definitely looked like X.  I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 and
sure enough got a login prompt.

It turns out dell shipped linux bootcds with kernels and small initrd
images capable of seeing both the esoteric cdrom (maybe scsi?!)
interface and disks (scsi or sata, who cares, it wasn't in a stock
Windows install mini image) at the same time.  This allowed the .CAB
files to be copied to a FAT partition, before Windows could start up and
continue the install.

Damion
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