[ale] fake usb drive

[Brian Pitts]

Jim Kinney wrote:
> I want to test an installation process on specific hardware. I would
> like to do this without burning a g'zillion DVD's.
> 
> Ideally, I would like to have the DVD.iso on my laptop be seen by the
> real hardware as a USB DVD drive. My gut instinct is that buring DVD's
> will be faster than trying to create a fake chunk of hardware. But my
> laptop has no DVD burner so I must use one from elsewhere
> (non-portable) and come back to the real machine with a warm disk.
> 
> Any ideas how to send "Hi! I'm a DVD drive" fake data down the USB
> cable when probed by BIOS? Then how to go about having the iso be "in
> the drive".
> 

Is this going to be safe?

Your laptop obviously runs the USB port as host

If you can hook a USB drive up to the specific hardware, it must run the
port as host as well.

This means electricity is being sent by both ends. I'm not an expert on
these things, but that sounds like a situation where the magic smoke
escapes.

If your laptop hardware has support for switching USB to device mode,
and if it's in the list of supported hardware here [0], then you can use
 the the File-backed Storage Gadget [1] to export a file fronm your
laptop as if it was a usb mass storage device.

[0] http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/
[1] http://www.linux-usb.org/gadget/file_storage.html

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts