[Oberon] Flash drives

[Thomas Frey]

The flash-based IDE drives work transparently with Bluebottle. With
modern drives, the Cylinder Head Sector (CHS) addressing is only used
for backward compatibility of the boot process.
Once the system is running (and, if the BIOS allows it, already in the
boot loader) blocknumbers are used for addressing. Bluebottle also works
with CF (Compact Flash) cards or USB flash sticks. In both cases there
are no physical cylinders, heads or sectors there. The partition table
addresses the blocks of the device by specifying virtual cylinders heads
and sectors that are then by the driver/bios converted to blocknumbers.

There are no new consequences for multiple operating systems. At least
not with the flash-based Samsung drives that are currently discussed in
the articles.
http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressRelease.asp?seq=20050523_0000123980

--Thomas

Douglas G. Danforth wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> "Flash-based drives possible for Apple laptops" is a heading in a recent
> article.
> 
> I was musing on what consequence this would have on "disk partitions"
> since there are no cylinders for flash drives.  Which makes me ask, "how
> dependent is the installation of Bluebottle on the partition concept?"
> 
> What are the consequences for multiple operating systems residing on the
> same flash memory?
> 
> -Doug
> -- 
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