USB booting :: Wipe grub ....?

Did it boot OK from the pendrive before? If not, then maybe it's a pendrive geometry problem. Anyway, to format the pendrive, you would boot normally to the HDD, open cfdisk, highlight the partition that's listed with your up/down arrow keys, and then select delete with the right/left arrow keys. Then make a new partition, and format. The instructions for that are in the DSL Wiki, and there's an important part there about setting your pendrive's geometry. Also, it's not recommended using extf3 to format the pendrive because it uses a little extra space to write the file system info, and it can get corrupt, and no Windows machine can read it if you should need that. I think the Wiki recommends FAT32.

PS. here's another good link on cfdisk: http://www.linux.com/howtos/IBM7248-HOWTO/cfdisk.shtml

Hi,

ext3 ahh ok I can change that ...

It did boot before on my old machine .... np

I'll try to reformat drive again ...

When dsl installs to pendrive does it do all that anyway?

Just not sure if my (hda) grub is failing or.. grub is still present on pendrive but cannot find /boot/grub ....

I should not need grub anyway on pendrive as dsl uses syslinux ( I think!!) ,

The reason I used grub was that I did not have to change drive heads (geometry) etc..

When working gives you a nice menu (you know that!!!) ..

Anyway I'll keep at it, I do not give up that easy

Thanks for your help

MrG

Good. Don't give up because we will all learn something from this. I'm at a loss at this point because I'm only a little past noobee stage. I'll tell you what I know. There is a syslinux install, available, but I think you still need a bootloader when you install to the pendrive. A bootloader, like grub, can reside on the MBR of the main hard drive and point to the pendrive for the OS, or it can reside on the pendrive if your computer's BIOS is able to see it as a boot device. It is possible that something in the boot directory of the pendrive is corrupt, so reformatting and reinstalling will fix it. You are right that grub can install past cylinder 1024. However, the limitation still seems to exist with pendrives. I'm not sure why, but anyway, here's the link in the Wiki: http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki....rive???

I found another interesting link that my help you:

http://fuzzymunchkin.dyndns.org/tdot/usbkeyfob/

Cool thanks very much...

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