USB booting :: awkward usb pen



I tried installing dsl withthe installer only to discover it split the pen into two partitions which could not be resized...
the computer then identifies the pen as sda1 and therefore a USB-HDD. The bios doesn't seem to like this and locks on post.

I have therefore repartitioned the pen drive so it appears as sda, and as a USB-ZIP drive.
Being as I want to be awkward and put a couple of other things on there, I therefore decided to install manually, pulling the files from the cd, rearranging the isolinux folder into the root folder, installing syslinux, and have got to the stage where it's looking for the knoppix image... and as it's /dev/sda not /dev/sda1 it's not finding the image...

I have extracted minirt24 but would like to know what I need  to edit to tell dsl to search /dev/sda and not /dev/sda1...
I think you may be mistaken. Your pen drive should (if it is /dev/sda) have an /dev/sda1 modifying minirt24 will do you no good. I think you may be confused as to how partitions exsist. Let me try to explain to you

In windows you have Hard Drive 1 sitting there. It has one large partition formated as fat32. This is partition 1 it just shows up as hard drive 1 because that is how windows chooses to portrait the divisions of the physical harddrive.

In linux that same hard drive exsists. But instead of "Hard Drive 1" is is given the name /dev/sda. That is it is a device (/dev) it is thought to be a scsi disk (/sd_) (via emulation) and it is the first drive so it is drive "a" /sda .

That partion that you so dearly want gone /dev/sda1 will always exsist nomatter how you partion the drive. the 1 after /dev/sda refers to that first partiton that you created on your drive. It is completely normal for linux to look there because that is where it should be.

If you dont have a /sda1 section how did you do it. I would look at your bios or you drive install before editing the minirt24 file. It gets nasty in there and you could end up with a non functional drive.
thanks for the reply.

the bios is set to boot usb-zip first then the main hard drive if I don't have anything plugged in. I know there is not a lot wrong with the drive itself because it starts the boot process fine, and I can start various debian installers... the trouble is starting dsl... it initialises fine, and loads the initial ram drive, just fails to find the knoppix file system...

when I bought the drive and plugged it in under knoppix, it came up as /dev/sda and mounted under /mnt/sda

when I used the dsl installer it created 2 partitions, sda1 and sda2. I want to get rid of sda2 and expand sda1, but qtparted in knoppix throws up errors when it gets to resising sda1.

so I removed all the partitions and used fdisk to crate a new dos partition table (option o?) wrote that and used mkdosfs /dev/sda -I to restore the drive back to it's original. (when I plug it in under knoppix, it detects it as /dev/sda)


If I instead of doing that, I create a new partition encompassing the whole drive (option n) then I can run mkdosfs /dev/sda1 and create the filesystem that way, but the the bios picks up the drive as a HDD and locks up on post... (when I plug it in under knoppix, it detects it as /dev/sda1)
I fixed it :D

The geometry was wrong... 42 sectors per track indeed!!!

anyway here's the info :)

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki....endrive
good to see that you were able to follow that wiki. I was really confused when i used it.
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