Rob Liebschutz writes:
I've been thinking about doing this for a while now. The only product that I've found so far is made by a company called MCSI ((619) 598-2177) , but the only thing I've been able to get out of them so far is that the darn thing emulates a DOS filesystem through the bios, though they referred me to another company that does the firmware for their card, and claimed that this company could do custom firmware for me. I think MCSI has a card that emulates a dual floppy as well.
I'd love a card that just provided a single raw drive emulations, even IDE would be fine, so I could just copy a whole bootable file sytem image into it, but I guess 2 floppy images would suffice.
The dual-floppy configuration seems better to me. I've built single-disk NetBSD filesystems that included the kernel, shell, and enough other stuff (mount, ifconfig, etc) to nfs-mount the real filesystems. (Well, yes, I did strip the kernel, but that's a detail :-) With a bit more work, it wouldn't be too tough to build a one-disk boot filesystem that could make a memory-based filesystem, copy a bunch of things there from a convenient server, and run gated (or whatever) from there. The reason the two-disk FLASH is nice is that if you ever have to update your boot fs for any reason, you can simply make a completely clean new one, and you're never in a state where your boot fs may be corrupt. (You switch the PRAM's notion of which "floppy" to boot only after the flash download finishes cleanly.) /a