Hi, Unburrying old email. I have a bug in on the need for a floppy boot-helper: <a href="http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/597">http://dev.sugarlabs.org/ticket/597</a> James are there any notes that you can add to the ticket to help someone who takes on this task? Is there anyone out there who would like to take on this task? Thanks, Caroline <div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 10:23 AM, James Simmons <<a href="mailto:jim.simmons@walgreens.com">jim.simmons@walgreens.com</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">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<div><div></div><div class="h5"> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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 </blockquote> </div></div></blockquote></div> -- Caroline Meeks Solution Grove Caroline@SolutionGrove.com 617-500-3488 - Office 505-213-3268 - Fax