Tried DSL's USB Boot guidelines, Rufus in DD, multibootusb, LILI. To no avail!

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[itrelated]

Tried DSL's USB Boot guidelines, Rufus in DD, multibootusb, LILI; to no avail!

I've successfuly booted/installed other common linux distros like Lubuntu.

I really want to try DSL on:

-Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit.
- Asus p8z77 V pro thunderbolt.
- i7


What do i have to do?

[CNK]

What exactly goes wrong when you try to boot? Does the DSL splash screen display? Do you see the start of the startup sequence? Does it complain that it can't find the partition containing the operating system (or something that sounds similar)?

If you can burn a CD and boot from it, that may work better.

[itrelated]

I got something like: "File system not found for DSL. DSL looked in sda, sdb, sdc, bla bla bla."

Basically scanned all connected drives and USB's!


Luckily i still have an external DVD player and maybe a CD lol.

If you have no other tip, will try burning it to a CD! Thanks!

[CNK]

That's typical of DSL not supporting the USB chipset used in your motherboard. It's a compatibility problem with your hardware, most likely because your hardware was made some years after the linux kernel that DSL is built upon was released.

If your external CD/DVD drive is USB, then it may suffer the same fate. Remaining options would be to use network booting, or to copy DSL to an internal hard disk partition and boot from it manually using Grub. Even then, you wouldn't be able to access USB devices within DSL.

DSL-N is based on a later kernel version than the main DSL and may have support for your USB chipset, so you could also try that.

[itrelated]

Network booting, or to copy DSL to an internal hard disk partition and boot from it manually using Grub.

This is actually what i want! I have a partition in a 2nd physical drive. This drive has files but no OS!
So i put DSL and install Grub in the same partition and it should work?

DSL-N is based on a later kernel version than the main DSL and may have support for your USB chipset, so you could also try that.

This will be my 2nd option!

[CNK]

To install to an internal partition, follow the instructions for installing to USB  (http://damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/install_to_usb_from_within_linux.html#Method_III:_Using_GRUB_as_boot_loader), but using the partition on your target HDD instead of a USB drive.

You'll need to add an option for booting Windows to the menu.lst example, and also add the "sata" boot command to the "kernel" line of the DSL entry if you're using a SATA HDD. Change the "root=/dev/sda1" bit of the kernel line to match the partition you use as well.

If the partition is formatted as NTFS, you'll have to copy the files off it, reformat it to ext2 or ext3 for DSL, then copy them back.

[itrelated]

I can do that!

So can Grub and DSL reside in the same partition!

[CNK]

The Grub bootloader itself should be installed to the boot partition on the HDD that the BIOS is set to boot from, it sounds like this is the one where you have Windows installed. It overwrites the Windows bootloader, which is why you need to include a command to start Windows in menu.lst (there should be plenty of guides regarding setting up Grub online, the Grub used with DSL is now called "Grub Legacy"). After starting up from the boot partition, Grub loads it's other files from whatever partition was specified when it was installed, which in this case should be the one with the rest of the DSL OS files in it.

[itrelated]

Got it!
Thank you very much!