Using floppy to boot from USB pendrive

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Using floppy to boot from USB pendrive
started by: dtf

Posted by dtf on May 27 2006,13:34

A friend of my son's would like to try DLS on his old laptop running windows 98. He does not have a workable CD drive. He does have a USB port but the BIOS does not support USB booting. He also has a working floppy drive.

So I was going to try use the floppy usb-boot image to boot from DSL loaded on a USB pendrive. I am trying this on my PC before trying it on his laptop.

I have created a boot image on the USB pendrive the USB-HDD option from the DSL install menu. I can set the BIOS in my computer to boot from the USB-HDD drive and that works fine.

I have created a boot usb floppy image using the instruction found in the wiki.

However on my PC when I set the BIOS to boot from the floppy and install the floppy and usb pendrive it starts to load linux24 but fails after about 4 or 5 dots complaining about needing a bootable image.

Does anyone have any ideas why I can't get this to work.

I just trying to test this on my PC before using on the old laptop.

Thanks.

Posted by pr0f3550r on May 27 2006,15:24

You have to specify to boot from the usb stick:

dsl fromhd=/dev/sda1

Posted by roberts on May 27 2006,15:38

Using the standard DSL boot floppy you can also use the option fromusb and it will scan usb devices

dsl fromusb

Posted by dtf on May 27 2006,16:26

Thanks for the information, I have try both suggestions and they both do the job. One other question for clarification.

Does it make any difference what image is loaded on the USB drive if I use the floppy image to start the boot sequence? I think I understand that the USB drive image has to match what your computer BIOS supports (i.e. USB-HDD or USB-ZIP) when booting directly from the USB drive but does it matter when booting using the floopy-->USB combination.

Posted by cbagger01 on May 27 2006,18:23

USBHDD is better because it creates a single data partition that can be used to store data for both DSL and MSWindows.

USBZIP is better if your drive is larger than 2GB in size.