Damn Small Linux - Not!

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

Hey guys, thanks for the cool distro! This is exactly what I was in search of..

Now that the formalities are over -- HELP!!

I have 2 1GB USB pen drives that I'm trying to get a VIA EPIA 5000 board to boot from.

Yes, it's restricted to USB-FDD or USB-ZIP, so I took the USB-ZIP path. I booted my laptop into DSL from the CD, ran the USB-ZIP installation and verified that the pens were both flashed correctly.

Oddly enough, one pen registers as /dev/sda the other as /dev/uba - well, that's just the start of the differences. The one that registers as /dev/sda doesn't even try to boot on the EPIA board. The machine acts like it's not even there.

The other pen, the one that registers as /dev/uba - it attempts to boot from (light comes on, flashes etc), but immediatly returns with "BOOT ERROR" in the POST screen, no Syslinux() blah messages at all. It's like it wants to boot, but can't - and with no error codes to work with, I'm getting frustramicatified.

I read through the post about drive geometry and tried a few different C/H/S settings to try to make it happy - but in the end I've failed..

My pen post-DSL installation is C/H/S - 988 / 64 / 32 for 1GB of space.

Does anyone know of any issues regarding 1GB pens that would cause this to fail?

The 1 pen that refuses to boot, I'm assuming it just doesn't have the ability to be a USB-ZIP device and doesn't properly POST to the BIOS. That I can live with.

The other pen seems like it's trying but can't - that I need to resolve Wink

TIA!

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

Just a suggestion for USB-ZIP
I would try to keep the first partition under the original ZIP specification of 100MB.

Since you cannot boot USB-HDD then
maybe also try a loadlin method?

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

Well..

The DSL-N installation does just that, no?

After I run the install, I check the partitions and there's 1 bootable partition at 100MB (99ish) with FAT16, and the rest in a second partition of .9GB...

I've also tried manually partitioning the pen with no luck.

Is there a brand of pen or something of that nature I should be looking for?

I'm so annoyed at this VIA ITX board for not having a USB-HDD mode.....

P

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

.. bump .. anyone have any ideas?

roberts · Joined: 17 Apr 2006 Posts: 320 Location: OC CA USA

Personally I don't think it is possible to change the geometry of a 1 GB or larger pendrive to look like a ZIP drive. But who knows? YMMV Betcha it would work on a small pendrive.
Did you see the posting of the link into the Wiki on geometry?
Did you see the posting regarding booting from USBHDD by changing the order in the BIOS on some M/B?

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

Yes, and Yes.

The VIA EPIA 5000 mobo doesn't even offer the USB-HDD as an option in BIOS - so there's nothing I can do in the BIOS to help out.

I have gotten the board to start talking to the USB pen at boot, but "BOOT ERROR" is about all it has to say. I'm going to try with a few different USB Pen manfacturers and see what happens.

As a fallback I'm also going to get an IDE->FLASH adapter and install DSL-N on that, to se how well that works.

The issue at hand is that I'm tasked with making a Linux bootable device using the VIA EPIA 5000 mobo, and no moving parts... bleah.

[IDC]Dragon · Joined: 22 Apr 2006 Posts: 41 Location: Hannover, Germany

I'm running DSL-N from a CF card, plugged into an IDE adapter. Works well, I never considered using USB instead. I hope that the CF card is faster, one less protocol layer/wrapper bottleneck.

Penumbra · Joined: 19 May 2006 Posts: 13

Just FYI --

I punted. I used the IDE->CF method, as the USB pens refused to work for me on this Mobo.

P