Booting from hard drive

In case you are building thin clients from old machines, you can use their hard drives for etherboot. There are many possibilities to accomplish this:

• you may boot with lilo the corresponding ltsp kernel
• you may boot with lilo etherboot boot rom
• you may boot etherboot boot rom from the boot sector of the hard disk

Shutting down hard drives after boot

Anyway, the hard drive is not needed later. But hard drive makes noise and also we don't want it to run all the time to lengthen its lifetime. So I added hdparm utility to /sbin to be able to shut down hard drive after booting the system. After that I added the following to /etc/rc.sysinit

if [ "${SHUTDOWN_HDA}" = "Y" ]; then
modprobe ide-disk
hdparm -Y /dev/hda
fi

and now it is possible to shut down hard drives of the hosts that need it by adding SHUTDOWN_HDA=Y to lts.conf

-- AntiSullin - 03 Sep 2005