[ale] fake usb drive

[JK]

Why not boot from a USB flash drive, for test purposes?  Would that
be way too different than booting from a USB DVD drive?

-- JK

Jim Kinney wrote:
> That's the process I was envisioning (not the escaping smoke part!).
> Of course my laptop drive is just not going to work like that...
> 
> Thanks, Brian. Looks like I'll be burning DVD's now. :-(
> 
> Hopefully I have to burn only a couple to hammer down the rest of the details.
> 
> On Mon, Jun 1, 2009 at 12:10 PM, Brian Pitts<brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
>> Jim Kinney wrote:
>>> I want to test an installation process on specific hardware. I would
>>> like to do this without burning a g'zillion DVD's.
>>>
>>> Ideally, I would like to have the DVD.iso on my laptop be seen by the
>>> real hardware as a USB DVD drive. My gut instinct is that buring DVD's
>>> will be faster than trying to create a fake chunk of hardware. But my
>>> laptop has no DVD burner so I must use one from elsewhere
>>> (non-portable) and come back to the real machine with a warm disk.
>>>
>>> Any ideas how to send "Hi! I'm a DVD drive" fake data down the USB
>>> cable when probed by BIOS? Then how to go about having the iso be "in
>>> the drive".
>>>
>> Is this going to be safe?
>>
>> Your laptop obviously runs the USB port as host
>>
>> If you can hook a USB drive up to the specific hardware, it must run the
>> port as host as well.
>>
>> This means electricity is being sent by both ends. I'm not an expert on
>> these things, but that sounds like a situation where the magic smoke
>> escapes.
>>
>> If your laptop hardware has support for switching USB to device mode,
>> and if it's in the list of supported hardware here [0], then you can use
>>  the the File-backed Storage Gadget [1] to export a file fronm your
>> laptop as if it was a usb mass storage device.
>>
>> [0] http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/
>> [1] http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/file_storage.html
>>
>> --
>> All the best,
>> Brian Pitts
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>> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>>
> 
> 
> 


-- 
A closed mouth gathers no feet.