[IAEP] Help Wanted: Keeper of the Hardware List

[Sean DALY]

thanks for that

What I'm wondering is if it's possible to tell if a USB stick even has
a boot sector.

I spent many frustrating hours last month trying to create a bootable
stick; none of them ever had the remotest chance of booting on
anything as I later found out :-(

Sean


On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Martin Dengler
<martin at martindengler.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 06:08:45PM +0200, Sean DALY wrote:
>> As far as I know we don't have a method yet for testing if a newly
>> loaded stick on a computer will be potentially bootable or not on
>> another :-(
>
> You've said this a few times, and I just want to point out one reason
> why we don't have it yet is that it's an intractable problem.  It
> can't be done perfectly.  It can't even be feasibly done by a large,
> dedicated organisation willing to pay lots of money to do this.
> That's why large organisations solve this problem by limiting the
> hardware they "support", and testing just on that (etc. etc. of course
> we all know this).
>
> Of course we can improve the situation by telling "upstream" what
> hardware doesn't work. I think that's what we're trying to do here.
>
>> Sean
>
> Martin
>