installed to usb stick, error on booting

Forum: USB booting
Topic: installed to usb stick, error on booting
started by: rhyek

Posted by rhyek on April 19 2006,19:34

i see a lot of people mentioning which stick brand name and model they're using. should this matter? well if it does, i'm using a 2GB cruzer micro. brand new.
seems to install fine using the usb hdd option from the tool. i've included a screenshot of the process.
so when i boot it up, it says 'Disk error' or something very similar. i'm trying this on two pc's at work.
last night at home, i did the same thing, only i got a
'Can't find kernel
boot:'
... or something very similar.
any ideas as to what might be the problem?

Posted by rhyek on April 19 2006,19:38

actually, when i tried at home last night, i did't set any boot paramaters.

Posted by tecker on April 19 2006,19:46

eh bit confused here.

You do or you dont get a Boot screen that looks like the live cd?
Is it:
1) IE it come up you press enter to boot and it errs out to a "limited shell"
2) you never see the boot screen?

Posted by rhyek on April 19 2006,19:51

never see the boot screen.
if you were using windows, the first hint of windows being loaded (i think it's Loading Windows).. this is were it gets stuck.
like i said, it's just 'Disk error' or something very similar.

Posted by rhyek on April 19 2006,20:59

i think it has to do with the geometry on the usb stick. never heard of that til now. it might explain the following line on that image up there:
/dev/sda1: Cluster sizes larger than 16k not supported

guess this means the whole installation wasn't successful.

Posted by mpen on April 19 2006,22:11

not sure, I don't think it's the geometry... syslinux isn't finding the kernel image (linux24)... so it doesn't even get as far as loading anything...

I notice it failed the partitioning....

and try installing with the USB-ZIP option.... I think it might be something to do with the stick being 2GB and the limit for size of fat16 partitions... that's my guess anyway...

the USB-ZIP option works by creating a 50MB partition for DSL and a big partition for the rest of the stick... so that would solve that problem...

to be honest I don't have much more of a clue than that... I've just won the war with a 64MB memory stick, and it worked very nicely too

Posted by rhyek on April 20 2006,04:05

well, i fixed the geometry on the pendrive. but guess what? i'm not sure if that's the issue either cuz when i tried installing the os to the pendrive once again using the usbhdd tool, the whole thing is repartitioned, and somehow the geometry is reset.

haven't tried usb-zip cuz when i ask to see the drive's info during the install tool process having selected usb zip, nothing is shown. can't really trust that.
fat16 has a maximun volume size of 2GB which should suit me just fine i think.
according to what i read on the wiki, it must be the geometry. checking the drive's info i see it's using 62 sectors/track (maximum for a boot partition should be 32). like i said, once i try installing the os to it, its reset to what it was originally.
:blues:

Posted by rhyek on April 20 2006,04:31

well i guess i'll go ahead and fix the geometry again and do a manual install. there's some instructions on how to do it at the < Debian wiki >.
i'll give it a shot later. :blues: