[ros-dev] ReactOS Hybrid-USB Key attempt

[Hermès BÉLUSCA - MAÏTO]

Hi all !

 

In this video :

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzFtJhksW7viRDRVMzluTnFjMlU/view?usp=sharin
g

(with strong French accent, sorry :P, and it was my first attempt at making
a video with a camera in one hand while doing the other things with the
other hand ^^), I show an attempt to create a hybrid-USB key by configuring
freeldr to load either a livecd (shown in the video) or a bootcd in ramdisk.

 

Many remarks are in order:

 

- there’s a crash when booting the bootcd image, early in phase 1 boot in Io
(can be reproduced locally on vbox for example, with similar freeldr.ini
parameters that I show in the video).

- the whole story consists in loading a ramdisk, so I avoid all the
USB-related storage problems we could (and certainly) encounter if I used
the USB key more like as we do for our current livecds, i.e. permanent reads
to the removable device.

- a ROS livecd that can be removable (in the sense that one can use another
cd to test something, while ROS is still running) should be done with some
kind of hdd image file instead, that is then loaded in memory (so that we
can then read and write to this virtual drive).

- something weird happens when freeldr loads the livecd iso in memory: first
it takes 7 minutes to just try to open the iso file, and then 7 other
minutes to load the iso proper. This problem needs to be investigated.

- we still report strange dates when listing files from the livecd (at least
when it is mounted as ramdisk), see the video.

- finally, when using Standard PC (non-ACPI) HAL, I don’t really think we
reposition HDD heads into “sleep position”, because when I switch PC power
off with the button I can hear the HDD making the noise of the heads quickly
going back to sleep position, whereas I don’t think this should happen if
the heads were being already in the correct position before I switch power
off (when using the “shutdown” command of FreeDOS, the other OS I have
installed in the PC, the noise isn’t produced).

 

Cheers,

Hermès.

 

PS: I keep the right to remove the video at any time if I notice misuses.
And it’s not an official video (even if I was playing around with Windows
Movie Maker with the ReactOS logo during the first seven seconds, and with
the website links at the end) !!