Well, by partitionless drives, I mean things like MP3 players and some rare flash drives where essentially the drive is just one big filesystem with no partitions. With more and more MP3 players supporting UMS mode (even many these days intelligently allowing you to switch between MTP for those DRM files and UMS for everything else) I'm seeing more people who want bootable MP3 players. The main catch (besides the fact that you can't do the fake USB-ZIP trick on a MP3 player) is that since these players have no partitions so the normal filesystem search will fail on many things (Finnix included) because they check for stuff like /dev/sda# when the player's filesystem is on /dev/sda. All that has to be done is to check for a non-partitioned filesystem like that in the normal check for filesystems.
Just a thought of something to look at while working on the next version anyway. It's really such a simple thing I can even manually add it myself even, so I figured it would be easy enough for you to implement (though making it check more automatically might require a little more scripting skills than I currently have.)
Finnix Forums » Ideas & Suggestions
Partitionless drive (mainly MP3 player) support.
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Posted Sat, 24 Jun 2006 08:24:04 -0700
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Finnix 88.0 should be able to work in the way you described, since it considers all found block devices, regardless of what they are named. That way, /dev/sdb (for example) is considered and tried, no matter if it's a CD, or a hard drive/flash drive with no partitions.
Of course, you answered your own question with the booting issue. Having Finnix on a MP3 player flash drive is useless if the BIOS has no clue how to boot it. You could bootstrap it with a minimal kernel and initrd on a CD, but why bother?Posted Fri, 28 Jul 2006 12:47:23 -0700 -
BIOSes can boot a MP3 player with Syslinux or whatever you prefer. Normally you have to do it in USB-HDD mode, but, mine actually says USB-ZIP when it is apparently in ZIP/HDD support mode. In this case, rather than following a MBR to another partition, it just directly boots the only partition which happens to have a bootloader. Mind you, I will admit that BIOS manufacturers are held to lower standards than everyone else, so there is no guarantee whatsoever that something which boots on my PC will boot on anyone else's (I believe this one should still be ok on any that support USB-HDD, but, admitedly it's unlikely many using USB-ZIP will be so forgiving of things that are so different from actual ZIP drives.)
Anyway, I'm glad to hear that Finnix 88.0 will look at block devices and not just partitions.Posted Sat, 29 Jul 2006 00:13:56 -0700