USB booting :: How to make Mini-ITX w/ Flash Drive happy



Wow, I really want to get DSL onto my Damn Small ITX pc! VIA EPIA MII6000

My final goal is boot DSL from the ITX's 512 MB flash drive. I probably need to first install DSL to my USB pen drive and then install to flash drive from there, but have had not a whif of success so far installing to th pen.

Tried d/l'ding dsl.1.5.iso, burnt to CD, md5sum checked out fine, but he won't boot up on any of my 3 linux boxes (suse 8.1, suse 9.1, dual suse9.2/installed knoppix) :-(

Only DSL I've so far managed to boot is the Embedded version on Toshiba Satellite laptop running windoze xp (cough), but I understand you can't do a DSL install from embedded (according to the wiki)

Has anyone faced this kind of situation down? Can you point me to links on THE ANSWERS? I'll probably need to manually copy files and do edits, but not sure which DSL file to copy. Other solution I thought of is network install. I've never done a network install, but willing to try almost anything at this point.

Still Tryin
Hmmmm, this looks promising....

Corsair Flash Voyager 1GB USB Flash Drive

http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....5;st=55
Mimi-ITX still unhappy :-(

I followed schemer's instructions to the letter. They are great instructions.
I can't emphasize enough the value of typing carefully, would also recommend
reading the man page on sfdisk. I laid in geometry for a .5 gig Corsair Flash
Voyager, formatted one partition with vfat, installed syslinux to one of my
Suse machines, went to DSL archives and picked up bootusb-0.8.img and
dsl-1.0.1.iso. Nadda, zilch, nuttin. I get 'boot failed'

(I also tried with dsl-1.5.iso, by the way, and tried coercing the bootfloppy
usb img into booting, he acted like he was going to get thru, but didnt')

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Still tryin
HI
If you are not getting DSL to boot on any of your boxes I would suspect you are not burning them properly.  Most software has a "burn ISO image" option you need to use.  As far as getting it on flash here is what I did.  I have a thin client with no floppy but does have two ide channels on the board.  I had to leave the box open for most of this because the cdrom drive won't fit in box.
1.  First ide channel I used ide-cf adapter set as master.  Partition 1 64MB. Partition 2 the rest.
2.  Second ide channel cdrom
3.  Set BIOS to boot from cdrom
4.  Booted into DSL from cdrom
5.  Frugal install to hda1 which is the first partion of the flash.
6.  Powered off system
7.  Removed cdrom from system
8.  Booted into DSL
good luck
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Mini-ITX is happy :-)

I usually use k3b/cdrecord on linux box. I must have done something wrong. I reburnt dsl iso 1.5, and he booted up fine. I'm writing this post from DSL on Mini.

Thank you so much for the tip, hawki.

I also had done a read of the pendrive_usbhdd.sh script, and that helped me understand what was going on during the Apps->Tools->'install to pendrive' config steps.

Next step will be to try to install DSL to the ide Flash Card. But I think I'm going to enjoy the view from this plateau and explore DSL awhile before pressing on.

I have a byte to chew on, tho. My Mini also has 2 ide channels, and the flash drive is plugged into first channel. My USB pendrive from which I can now boot is detected as a scsi device. But I take it from your install steps that a flash device plugged into ide channel is not considered scsi -- sdx -- but rather an hdx type of device. I was a bit uncertain on that score. Also, I'm going to go find the frugal install script and do a read-thru. I wondered if I needed to pre-partition the flash drive, or if the script will do that job.

/dennis
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