booting from USB CDROM w/o BIOS support

Forum: USB booting
Topic: booting from USB CDROM w/o BIOS support
started by: msuho

Posted by msuho on Jan. 13 2006,22:40

I just picked up a LiteOn external USB CD-ROM drive. I'm trying to boot DSL from it using a USB-HDD Floppy, as my EPIA 800 mobo BIOS does not support USB-CDROM booting. No luck so far (I tried fromhd). If someone has done this?
If so, what boot options did you use?

Thanks,

Mark

Posted by cbagger01 on Jan. 16 2006,04:58

Is your LiteON USB CDROM drive a standard USB Mass Storage Device? Or do you need to install special drivers in order to get it to work with Windows XP?

If it is not a standard USB Mass Storage Device, then it is unlikely to be bootable from the USB boot floppy.

However, a standard USB pendrive should still work fine.

Also you could try a "Poorman's Install" and copy the contents of the CD over to your hard drive at C:\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX (note the uppercase letters). This assumes that your hard drive is formatted as FAT or FAT32 (MSDOS/Win95/Win98/WinME) and NOT NTFS (NT/Win2000/WinXP)

Posted by msuho on Jan. 16 2006,19:35

cbagger-

Thanks for the suggestion. I had the drive partitioned as a linux (type 83) partition.

I ended up plugging an internal CD-ROM drive into the EPIA 800 temporarily. It only has a 50W power supply, but that seemed enough to power the CDROM & CF card. I then booted the CD & used a traditional HD install.

Thanks again,

Mark