cvs commit: src/sys/dev/usb umass.c

[Nate Lawson]

On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Anders Nordby wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 25, 2003 at 06:21:16PM +0100, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> > Booting from USB devices ?
> 
> Booting from USB devices is particularly interesting when it comes to
> these small flash disks etc. If only the BIOSes could support them
> (don't know if there are some that do this yet). Given that CD-Roms
> need to be burned, and floppies are obsolete, I was hoping we could boot
> from small devices like this.. </dream on>

Surprise, you can.  Compact flash speaks ATA so you just need a converter
from compact flash to 3.5 or 1.5" standard hard drive connectors.  They
cost about $20 online.  The USB CF adapters have a chip in them that
speaks UMASS (SCSI over USB) on the host side and ATA on the flash
side.  So if you can boot an ATA drive, you can boot CF(*).

ATA and SCSI aren't that different nowadays.

-Nate

* Modulo some systems that have bios bugs in addressing CF