Slashdot Mirror
IBM Using iPod to boot Linux on PCs
Applejack writes "Looks like iPod fever has caught on to Big Blue. IBM has a yet unreleased iPod-based software for rescue, restore, and recovery of failed Windows PCs. I read this description of the software on Amit Singh's blog, whose group at IBM apparently created this stuff. If I understand this correctly (and I think I do), the iPod contains IBM's rescue software along with Linux. A crashed PC boots into Linux from the iPod, after which you get all kinds of rescue & restore functionality ... web browsing and all, even if the PC's drive is totally hosed. All this while the iPod keeps working normally as a music player as it would. The blog has pointers to further information, including a Windows Media demo of the thing. " Should be noted this is not iPod specific; USB devices will do.
No kidding. I could keep the iPod in my pocket stuffed with tunes, and simply use a USB thumb drive. . . which I already do, using BartPE.
-nB
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Aren't there several free live linux distros already easily available with the same capability?
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
"Should be noted this is not iPod specific; USB devices will do."
Thanks for this little sentence hidden at the end of the article. And somehow the headline looks rather sensationalist, doesn't it? They are using a USB mass storage device with Linux to rescue broken CDs. Wow. Why did nobody else have this idea before...
Because it costs $150 for a single-seat, limited-use license?
...any USB (or Firewire, depending on the system)device will serve this purpose. Oh, Slashdot, what happened to you over the years?
If you're looking for a cheaper solution, check out the Ultimate Boot CD. It has tools to test memory, CPUs, hard disks, and so much more.
It's definitely something to keep handy and is much cheaper than an iPod.
When the iPod first came out, I thought that the coolest thing was that I could have my entire system on it and any Mac I encountered could boot my system
Cool, yes. Practical?
The tiny Toshiba drives in the iPods aren't designed for sustained use as a computer's system volume.
You could easily thrash the poor little thing to death doing anything more demanding than playing back MP3's in shuffle mode, and then good luck finding a replacement. There are virtually no 1.8" hard drives available in the end-user market right now, as the demand for new iPods means Toshiba is selling pretty much their entire production runs directly to Apple.
Sorry to reply to my own post, but after watching the video, it seems there would be at least two advantages over Knoppix:
1. A USB Flash drive/MP3 player is somthing you might be carrying anyway.
2. It looks as if you can mirror your internal drive to the USB device as a precautionary measure and then boot off the USB drive when the interal one fails. I do this with my iBook and iPod using CCC or SuperDuper!
Of course, your laptop must support booting from USB/Firewire as well.
If you boot up from your Knoppix CD where do you plan on saving your data when you recover?
1. Any USB/Firewire device
2. Another internal hard drive
3. Any other PC connected through virtually any connection (serial, parallel, cross-over cable, SSH, FTP, etc)
4. Floppy!
> figure out how to get my bios to boot from USB
You probably can't boot from USB. A few motherboards claim to be able to do it, but very few actually work. I work-on 20 or so computers a week, and I've never seen one that works. Heck, more often than not, CD boot still doesn't even work with the average motherboard. If you buy a nice Asus or Abit, it will work, but the cheap ones I keep running into at work simply won't boot from CD. That means you can't reinstall XP on them. I spend half my time removing harddrives from customer computers so I can reinstall XP from a CD. I still think Microsoft should be shot for disallowing floppy boots to reinstall. With Me and 98, we could boot off of a Microsoft supplied floppy then reinstall from CD. Microsoft no longer allows that.
it depends a lot on what generation ipod you have. with older ipods you have to put the ipod itself into 'disk mode' for windows to see it as a drive. newer ipods (the mini included) this is no longer the case and they work out of the box as a normal usb storage device.
not sure what is going on with your 4th gen (i have a 40g 4th gen and a 4g 1st gen mini), because any computer with firewire and/or usb should be able to read it as a hard drive without installing any software at all.
many (most?) windows machines lack the firmware to be able to boot directly off a usb or firewire drive.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
FYI, iPodLinux doesn't yet support audio output on 4G iPods.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
--If something I said could be taken two ways, and one of those ways made you cry, then I meant the other way.
Yeah, well most computers in need of such emergency boot technology have a BIOS that doesn't support USB booting. You might look cool while plugging the iPod in to the PC, but when no one is looking, you'd better slip in a KNOPPIX cd prior to booting up!
1. The parent was talking about a universal boot disk, not something to use in place of a standard fixed boot HD.
I will admit, I'm not an expert on Mac hardware nor OS design, but can a Mac really boot from one device and then transfer the system volumne designation to another device once booted?
Modern OSes are too big to be loaded into memory all at once. I would expect that if you booted a Mac from an iPod drive, the system would have to go back to the iPod occasionally to load device drivers, access swap space, etc. And that could easily be more strenuous on the delicate microscopic mechanisms of the iPod drive than playing back audio files would be.
2. iPods have been out long enough for failure rates to be known. There has been lots of discussion about batteries dying early but not much about failed hard drives.
Sure there has, you just haven't been paying attention.
Read the iPodHacks forums, or check eBay for listings of used iPods, or go to the Apple store and find a Genius Bar employee candid enough to tell you why people have been returning iPods for RMA. The MTBF of a hard drive will drop significantly if you use it outside of its design parameters. That's not FUD, it's FACT.
3. If your iPod drive dies, replacements are easy to find.
Oh? You think so?
The 20GB G3/G4 iPod drive is Toshiba model number MK2004GAL (actually, the iPod may use an Apple-specific version of this model with custom firmware, but let's ignore that for now). How many retailers can you find that have this component in stock? It only took me 3 months to find one, maybe you'll beat my time. Good luck.
The 60GB iPod photo drive is model MK6006GAH. Find me a single company that even lists a price for this component. Go on, I dare you.