USB booting :: Pendrive geometry



DSL is normally booted up with syslinux or isolinux to allow entry of custom boottime parameters.

So having a USB boot system that uses the same tools allows people to boot up via USB device using the same methods that they are already used to with the livecd.
hmk, maybe that's the reason I can't get my stick booting..
how comes that I get an odd number of sectors when using the formular "total_sectors / 32 / number_of_heads = no_of_cylinders" ?

Bytes: 262144000
Total Sectors: 262144000 bytes / 512 = 512000 sectors
Cylinders: 512000 sectors / 32 / 9 heads = 1777,77778

Or is there a mistake anywhere?

I was following a guid which told me to do a "sfdisk -S 32 /dev/sda" and then setting the partitions. Could that cause any trouble?

Your help is greatly appriciated!


Below the output of fdisk and sfdisk:

sfdisk output
-------------
Disk /dev/sda: 1777 cylinders, 9 heads, 32 sectors/track
Units = cylinders of 147456 bytes, blocks of 1024 bytes, counting from 0

  Device Boot Start     End   #cyls    #blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *      0+    539     540-     77759+   6  FAT16
/dev/sda2        540    1776    1237     178128    6  FAT16
/dev/sda3          0       -       0          0    0  Empty
/dev/sda4          0       -       0          0    0  Empty

fdisk output
------------
Disk /dev/sda: 262 MB, 262144000 bytes
9 heads, 32 sectors/track, 1777 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 288 * 512 = 147456 bytes

  Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1   *           1         540       77759+   6  FAT16
/dev/sda2             541        1777      178128    6  FAT16

Bytes: 262144000
Total Sectors: 262144000 bytes / 512 = 512000 sectors
Cylinders: 512000 sectors / 32 / 9 heads = 1777,77778
(brad)

Also Im getting the message "Total number of sectors not a multiple of sectors per track" which is not correct:
512000 / 32 = 16000
Try formatting your drive with the Dellll bootable USB key utility program for MSWindows:

http://www.bay-wolf.com/utility/usb_memkey.zip

Then test and make sure that the usb key will boot.

If so, then boot into DSL and overwrite the key with the Install to pendrive function.

The Dell utility should create a partition with the correct geometry.  Then you can use the newly created partition for a bootable linux.
My math isn't so good, could someone give me the correct geometry if mine is showing 133674 cylinders, 255 heads, 63 sectors/track?  Its a san disk 4GB cruzer mini pendrive but fdisk and others seem to show 1000GB.
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