USB-ZIP switch partitions?

Forum: USB booting
Topic: USB-ZIP switch partitions?
started by: wally

Posted by wally on June 01 2006,11:49

I am wondering if it is possible to switch the partitions on an USB stick after an USB-ZIP install.
I got an USB stick of 512 Mb and the USB-ZIP install is only a few Mb's.

Is it possible to switch the partitions so that I (when I'm on a Windows XP machine) can see my /home/dsl/ directory and can put data on the stick?

And if it's possible, how do I do that?

Posted by humpty on June 02 2006,07:55

It's like that cos USB-ZIP install works best on small partitions and if it's on the first partition (for booting).

But setting that aside, I have to admit I swapped mine for the very same reason as you, being able to see the big partition in windoze. This means you have to boot it using a floppy or loadlin from a dos (hd or floppy) disk.

You can use fdisk or sfdisk to re-create the partitions. But I use Ranish Partitioner (a dos program) instead.

Posted by wally on June 02 2006,08:09

Isn't it possible to edit isolinux and tell him he has to boot from sda2? Cause if that is possible you don't have to use a floppy disk to boot DSL.

I know it is easy to do with Grub and Lilo, but is it just also that easy with isolinux?

Posted by humpty on June 02 2006,08:39

You can try editing syslinux.cfg for that. But there's no
guarantee usb-zip boot will like the big partition.

Let me know if it works, then I can abandon my efforts to get
freedos to boot usb. :laugh:

Posted by cbagger01 on June 04 2006,05:06

FYI,

You CAN get FreeDOS to boot USB.

At least I was able to do it with a pendrive and a USBHDD installation.

The Dell USB key boot utility will create a USBHDD drive with FreeDOS on it.

From there you can manually install DSL (poorman's install. Copy the files over from the livecd) and then use the loadlin program to launch DSL from the DOS prompt or the autoexec.bat file.

Posted by humpty on June 05 2006,15:35

booting from a one partition drive tends to make it read-only.
how to make it rw ?

Posted by cbagger01 on June 05 2006,17:30

Add the word "frugal" to your boot command, ie type:

dsl fromhd=/dev/hda1 frugal

You might still need to use "Emelfm as Super User" in order to write to the drive.