USB booting :: frugal vs pen - boot problems

The problem isn't with the instal. the install goes smoothly, the question is why Lilo doesn't boot?

My USB drive is not a flash drive, but a mini hdd.

The USB drive shows up as /dev/sda

I made a 50 mb /dev/sda1 partition with ext2
I made the remaining into FAT32 on /dev/sda2(so I can boot it in linux and also access all data from both windows and linux).

I made MyDSL dir to be in /dev/sda2 and backups to be on /dev/sda2

lilo seems to install fine.

Then during boot, I select to boot form USB boot device... and all I get is that "L"

using grub I just get a failure saying no OS was found. (I think from the bios)

Any ideas?

If you get the grub menu then at least you know your bios is attempting to boot from it and can read the mbr. My first suggestion is to add a waitusb to the boot options. This will allow time for the usb drive to register. Pressing e from the grub menu will allow you to specify this.

I'm not getting a grub menu. The bios gives an error saying there's no OS available to boot. It gives me the same error if I try to boot from my floppy drive which I don't have.

anyone have any ideas about this lilo/boot problem?

Did you try the pendrive installations?

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