[IAEP] Experiences with Soas2-200904231400.iso

[James Simmons]

Caroline,

Normally the System BIOS recognizes the devices installed on your 
system.  The BIOS is a kind of software that runs before your operating 
system runs.  Your operating system often will work with the BIOS rather 
than working with hardware directly.  In any case, this boot disk is 
doing something clever, in that it can find USB drives and make them 
bootable without help from the BIOS.  Apparently it can only find them 
if they are attached directly to the motherboard, and on the older 
computers that need such a diskette to work that generally limits you to 
the slower USB 1.1.

The guy who wrote this knows more about how computer hardware works than 
a typical programmer knows.  He may have reverse engineered something or 
he may know trade secrets he would not be allowed to reveal.  That would 
prevent a GPL version.

In any case, it doesn't work well enough to be a good alternative to a 
boot CD and it is not likely it could be made to work better than it 
does.  It looks like the original goal of PLOP was to provide tools to 
recover data from or repair computers that cannot be booted up 
normally.  For that purpose it's more than adequate.

As for having a boot CD that did not have its own kernel, you have the 
same issues with that as you would with the boot diskette.  There would 
be no advantage to using a CD versus a diskette.  In fact the diskette 
does its work very quickly.  If you had an older computer that allowed 
you to boot from USB but only recognized 1.1 ports you'd have the same 
situation.

You might try making the diskette following the instructions on that 
website.  It isn't that difficult, and the software doesn't cost 
anything to download. 

James Simmons

> Interesting.  How hard would it be for someone to create a GPL version 
> of a boot diskette?  Would it necessarily only recognize USB 1.1? Even 
> if it does, the computers that I want it for probably only have USB 
> 1.1 ports.
>
> Having the CD have a kernel on it seems to be problematical because 
> that means we often need a new CD for every new version.  I don't 
> thoroughly understand the technology here.  What is the theoretical 
> minimum we need on a CD or Diskette to enable boot on a computer that 
> can not boot directly from a USB? 
>
> thanks!
> Caroline