[Coco] Bootable PCI USB Card? (On-Topic, really!)

[Roger Merchberger]

Rumor has it that Mike Pepe may have mentioned these words:
>Rod Barnhart wrote:
>>There are adapters that take a USB drive and plug into a CF reader? If so,
>>then he could plug said CF reader into an IDE cable, and problem solved (not
>>the most elegant solution though). Otherwise, the original problem remains -
>>he's not able to boot from a USB device.
>>Rod
>
>No, but a 1 or 2G CF card would hold more than enough info to just boot a 
>DOS image and run an emulator with some CoCo floppy images.

True, but my gigger CF cards are for my camera (reformatting them bootable 
just might b0rk them for storing images) and the small ones are already 
formatted for my CoCo's SuperIDE. It would be *yet* another thing I'd have 
to carry around (to boot my machine at work from it, for example), I'd have 
to tinker with *every* system I'd want to boot from the rascal (or install 
a CF->IDE card in *every* system I'd foresee wanting to boot from)...

And modifications like that forgo the laptop altogether.

The USB "Plug it in, make it boot" just seemed like the perfect solution 
for "Instant CoCo" ;-) - too bad the machines I wanted it for the most 
aren't compatible with it. That, and I already have a 2G USB key that's 
usually in my pocket...

>Another option would be to use a boot loader, like grub, and just set up a 
>DOS partition on another physical disk.

/dev/hda1 == WinXP (for work & MapPoint software)
/dev/hda2 == swap for Linux
/dev/hda3 == SuSE 10.1
/dev/hda4 == Extended partition for the last 2
/dev/hda5 == debian and/or LFS scratch partition
/dev/hda6 == LFS6 install with everything I need Linux-wise (& a *lot* 
faster than a std. distro...)

And that's just my laptop. That's why I wanted *simple.* ;-)

Anyway, thanks all for all the info!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--

Roger "Merch" Merchberger   | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch at 30below.com.         |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers