Really bad install problems

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Really bad install problems
started by: tecker

Posted by tecker on April 18 2006,22:04

I fear that i may have destroyed my flash drive that i was going to install DSL to.

After installing unsing a USB-ZIP setup and trying the setup it seemed to work fine. The boot however kernel paniced ( no knoppix found) and i decided that maybe the install was bad so i went back to redo.

Upon trying to install to the system it said that the system was write protected. I am trying some ideas but will let you know.

Posted by tecker on April 18 2006,22:45

Ok. So i followed the Setting up the USB Geometry wiki entry and got lost at step 2 and tried some things.

I then ran the USB-ZIP setup again. It was in VMWare and the script just seemed to hang. I killed it and re-ran it and I hung in the Geometry section.

Now it seems that I am unable to do anything with the drive. It is giving me a unable to read setor 0 error and nothing happens.

Is this thing now just shot or can i recover it? Any and I mean ANY ideas will be good otherwise it back to get another.

Posted by tecker on April 18 2006,22:48

Oh yea. This is the flashdrive info:

Orginal SFdisk info was 1019cyl, 4 head, 62 sect/trac.

It is an off brand generic usb drive and 128 mb mem.

If that helps great if not sorry for the forumn spam.

Posted by doobit on April 18 2006,22:52

If I can come upwith a spare $20 I'm going to destroy one of these things so I can try to recover it. So far I've installed DSL on five of them without any problems.
I think you should be able to recover it, in theory. You may be able to use CFdisk to delete any resident partitions, then reformat as FAT16. The geometry maybe needs to be fixed. I can't help simplify the process any. A lot of it needs to be done on paper with a calculator.

Posted by tecker on April 18 2006,23:01

Heck give my the equations an i will do it myself. Give me some hints as the wiki didn't make any sense. That wiki needs to be updated and I will do it if i recover this and understand it.

I tried to put the original geometry for the drive. The sector 0 is really a problem as CFdisk will not not read the drive (invalid disk). I will post all of the problems that I have from the console.

Thanks for the ideas. I will keep working at it.

Posted by tecker on April 19 2006,16:23

Sorry all but i cant seem to get the drive to give me the same errors again. I ditched VMware and went to a strait LiveCD boot. It installed there and found that it put the drive on sdb. Ran an install there and it came out fine.

Now it wont boot from the drive. it was created as a USB-ZIP. When boot it will not find the drive and reports it as read only. ANy clue on how it locks the drive via software as i am guessing this is the problem.

Ill try some things later.

Posted by doobit on April 19 2006,16:56

Sounds like you are almost at the point of getting it. At least your USB pen is not toast. I think you should try to do a USB HDD install and see it it restores your pen to full capacity.

Posted by tecker on April 19 2006,19:33

Yep tried it and it works. So the pen is not dead. I saw that this time the Geometry of the pen is correct for the USB-ZIP (Cyl, Head, Sect wize) but only the USB-HDD will boot.

is there instructions on how to install manually for a USB-ZIP? In windows or via a copyover? The syslinux part?