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.

Re:No, Really?

[networkBoy]

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

Free

[QMO]

Aren't there several free live linux distros already easily available with the same capability?

Not ipod specific

[Anonymous Coward]

"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...

Re:ERD

[prisoner]

Because it costs $150 for a single-seat, limited-use license?

Why didn't the author realize...

[Anonymous Coward]

...any USB (or Firewire, depending on the system)device will serve this purpose. Oh, Slashdot, what happened to you over the years?

Ultimate Boot CD

[cjsnell]

If you're looking for a cheaper solution, check out the Ultimate Boot CD [sourceforge.net]. 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.

Re:ERD

[poot_rootbeer]

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.

Re:And this is different from Knoppix how?

[milesw]

Sorry to reply to my own post, but after watching the video [ibm.com], 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 [bombich.com] or SuperDuper! [shirt-pocket.com]

Of course, your laptop must support booting from USB/Firewire as well.

Where to save your data

[milesw]

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!

Re:i need some help botting from usb

[Anonymous Coward]

> 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.

Re:boot from iPod

[zonker]

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.

Re:hmmm...

[damiam]

FYI, iPodLinux doesn't yet support audio output on 4G iPods.

Re:i need some help botting from usb

[corsican]

WTF??? I didn't write that!!!

If BIOS will let you...

[mathmatt]

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!

Re:Free

[_Swank]

I will venture a guess that there are NO linux distros with the specific ability specified in the article. What it seems everybody is missing is that this is NOT a general recovery solution. This is a specific recovery solution that works with the XPoint software listed (also called IBM Rescue and Recovery). This software is installed now on every new IBM Thinkpad (and maybe their desktops as well) and essentially stores images of a person's hard drive on a hidden portion of their hard drive. For example, my Thinkpads hard drive is technically 80GB but when I first received it there was, I believe, only 60GB available in Windows because IBM creates a hidden partition that is used specifically for storing the images of the first 60GBs. In case of OS corruption of any sort, one can then use the utilities provided by the BIOS to restore a recent working (and complete) image.

Yes one could use linux to do something similar, but not that works with this IBM R&R software. So for all those without IBM systems (or the Xpoint software separately installed) this is more pointless than anyone here seems to realize. However, for those with IBM systems, it is significantly more useful than most people here seem to realize. First, in the event of a hard drive crash the current setup of this software is useless because the images are restricted to being on the hard drive that just crashed. However, being able to offload these images to any other external drive now both frees up all of your hard drive for actual work and allows you to easily recover everything in the event of the hard drive crash. Most people I know with Thinkpads remove that software immediately so they can reclaim their entire hard drive, now they can have the best of both worlds.

Re:ERD

[poot_rootbeer]

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.