booting from external Hard drives

[Olaf Hoyer]

On Sat, 17 Apr 2004, Rob Justen wrote:

> Is it possible to boot Free BSD from a external hard drive

Well, depends on the type of external disk.

Of course, external SCSI enclosures are quite standard in Server
environment, and single disk cases are quite cheap on ebay...
So SCSI will work without problems.

Booting from other external disks depends on the technology:

When there are enclosures, that map themselves as SCSI, like some IDE
things, yes.
With Serial ATA, we also will see some external storages, once fitting
controllers are widespread.

But what you have in mind, is probably USB and firewire.
This depends on 2 things:
1) The BIOS of the PC has to know about these devices, and has to try to
bootstrap from them.
2) the OS has to know, that it is run from a different device like
traditional IDE/SCSI, because USB looks different.

As far as I know, FreeBSD is not capable of fully booting from external
USB storage, but I haven't followed the development in the last few
months there.

HTH
Olaf

-- 
Olaf Hoyer        ohoyer at gaff.hhhr.ision.net
Fuerchterliche Erlebniss geben zu raten,
ob der, welcher sie erlebt, nicht etwas Fuerchterliches ist.
(Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Boese)