[Techtalk] NFS Booting from LILO

[Meredydd]

On Wednesday 14 January 2004 18:55, Telsa Gwynne wrote:
> * Take drive out, attach to a converter cable (handwave handwave),
> stick into machine with spare drive bay, do the install onto the
> drive in the other machine, put drive back into laptop.
Little to no handwaving necessary - you can get these things quite 
cheaply (mine was a couple of pounds from CPC - I was in *precisely* 
this position - b0rked FDD). It really is just changing the size of the 
connector - laptops use IDE too, it's just on a smaller connector which 
carries its power on a couple of the connector pins, so the converter 
really is one converter of each type soldered back-to-back on a PCB, 
with a dangling lead for a standard PC power connector. By the way, 
watch out for that last one - when you plug a "normal" HD in the wrong 
way up, the drive doesn't spin up. When you plug a laptop HD into the 
connector the wrong way up, you put power supply voltages across data 
pins. Zzt.

Oh, and another thing to be really quite careful of when you're trying 
to make the disk bootable - lilo will want to remember which disk to 
boot from, so if the laptop's HD is /dev/hdc, and it boots fine on the 
desktop (or whatever "host" machine you're using), it won't boot when 
it goes back in the laptop, and the same drive is now /dev/hda. What I 
generally do is do the install, then halt and switch the laptop disk to 
primary master, then boot off a floppy to install LILO.

Meredydd