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Article posted on Mar 29

One More Feature for the Road

Posted by Ryan Finnie on March 29, 2006, 10:12 pm

Kernel 2.6.16 has made the cut, and final CD images have been mastered. One final round of testing, and Finnix 87.0 should be released Friday!

One small new feature made it through at the last moment. One feature I always liked is in the Windows installation CDs. When you boot from the CD, it says something to the effect of "Press any key to boot from CD." If you don't press a key within a few seconds, the CD moves on to booting the first hard drive.

In previous versions of Finnix, if you did not type anything at the boot prompt, it would eventually just boot Finnix. Now, if no input is detected in 60 seconds, the CD simply boots the first hard disk. This way, you can reboot Finnix remotely, and have your normal OS load if you have a CDROM drive that likes to suck the CD back in during BIOS POST.

3 Comments
Posted in Development, Finnix

3 Responses to “One More Feature for the Road”

Nazo says:

March 31, 2006 at 9:24 am

Ah, I've played with this myself. I presume you're still going to be using Syslinux (well, ISOLinux specifically)? Only thing is, in theory there could be a system setup where the first harddrive isn't what gets booted. You can try localboot 0 and if the BIOS supports it then it will boot the next device by BIOS, but, I find a lot of BIOSes (including my own) fail at this. Probably best to just chainload "hd0 0" and people with strange setups have to deal with it I guess.

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Ryan Finnie says:

March 31, 2006 at 3:12 pm

Nazo:

Yes, "localboot 0" (or "localboot -1", I can't remember which one was the "fail and move on to the next" option) would have been the best choice if it worked. I tried it on 5 machines, and 4 of them failed and skipped directly to PXE booting.

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Nazo says:

April 4, 2006 at 9:13 am

Yeah. chain.c32 hd0 0 works best for me. Just thought you should be warned that that only tries manually to load the first harddive as perceived by the chainloader, so can fail to work on some systems too. Since it doesn't rely on crappy bioses to support actual standards, it's more likely to work than localboot though.

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