[OmniBook] can I use a usb drive as external boot device?

[Matt Taggart]

"Pareti, Joseph" writes...

> Hi, thanks for your reply. It looks to me that the link you proposed
> applies to windows; infact I am running red hat enterprise linux
> (release 3, based on 2.4). What can I do?

It's been years since I did it (a bunch of us in the Linux lab at HP had 
the same laptops). The Windows utility just prompts you to insert a floppy 
and then writes a bootable image to it, you don't have to do it on the 
omnibook itself. I think we had find and borrow an actual Windows machine 
to generate the floppy and then we shared it. Once you have one floppy you 
can make an image of it with dd and then write new floppies when needed. If 
you can't find a real Windows machine maybe someone on the list who has 
access to one could produce an image for people to use.

I tried running the utility under Wine and it started a GUI Window 
explaining it was going to write a floppy, but uses some real mode stuff 
when trying to write the floppy and doesn't seem to work. It might be 
possible somehow but I didn't try too hard.

Just a similar note while we're on the topic: for years lots of firmware 
update utilities (not just from HP) were delivered as DOS utilities that 
create a floppy. I've been able to deal with some of these by creating a 
bootable FreeDOS floppy/CD with the utility on it, boot it, run the utility 
to create the floppy, and then boot the floppy to do the update. Often 
tricky because you can't use a floppy drive you're booted from (el torito 
cdroms help work around this). But since this omnibook utility is a GUI 
Windows thing, you can't do those tricks.

Fortunatately the "utility to write a utility" thing seems to have gone 
away and now most people seem to distribute zip files (or self-extracting 
zip files) with pure DOS utilities (which FreeDOS can deal with) or in some 
cases even Linux Utilities (the HP ProLiant stuff does Linux update 
utilities).

Good luck,

-- 
Matt Taggart        Open Source & Linux Organization R&D
taggart at fc.hp.com   Hewlett-Packard