Re: [PLUG] [plug-announce] Tuesday, Apr 12, 2011 - "From POST to xhost: The Linux Boot Process" presented by Rich Freeman (PLUG North@CoreDial in Blue Bell)

[JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org>]

> Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 11:02:34 -0400
> From: Rich Freeman

[...]
> And JP, thanks for keeping me honest on my MS-DOS claims.  I suspect
> that you might have more success with a non-USB floppy controller
> (physical or emulated), for the reasons you suggested.

Yup.  And I'm an idiot.  The reason the PE-650 didn't work is that it 
HAS a physical floppy drive.  It's all black on black and in a shadow in 
my rack; that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

So it booted just fine when I dumped the USB floppy drive and used the 
built-in one.  I did have to turn it on and fiddle with boot order in 
the BIOS.  Then I booted, got an A: prompt and was unable to type as the 
USB keyboard (that just worked to change the BIOS settings), didn't work 
anymore.  :-)


> Believe it or
> not when you turn on your modern 64-bit PC the BIOS will instruct the
> Northbridge to ensure that accessing address 1MB+1 goes to address 1
> in memory, just as it would on an 8088 with only 20 physical address
> lines but the ability to logically address ~20.09 bits.  And no, JP, I
> have no idea whether Intel-based Macs gate A20...:)

I'll try to remember to bring the floppy & drive to PLUG W and we can 
test it if someone has a Mac laptop.

Later,
JP
----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
JP Vossen, CISSP            |:::======|      http://bashcookbook.com/
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