usb booting

Forum: USB booting
Topic: usb booting
started by: riyadh

Posted by riyadh on Sep. 21 2006,14:10

i purchased a Sandisk cruzer micro 512mb drive to try to boot dsl form usb flash drive. i tried the usb hdd install on dsl 3.01 and it failed with an error to the effect that it could not find a fat partition. i then tried to format is with win xp and found that it took about 10 minutes to format 1% of the drive. i then discovered that the size of the drive reported under win xp was 0.99 terrabytes. a similar size was reported by fdisk when i attempted to create new partitions on the drive. also the computer no longer attempts to boot from the USB. before i tried to partition it used to attempt to boot from the usb but the bios would get stuck. can anyone help with this problem.

Posted by vavisky on Sep. 25 2006,00:38

You could make the usb boot disk according to the guidance here.
(http://www.althack.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=27)

Under the aid in the webpage,I make the drive and boot from it without many problems, and my problems only happend after entering the DSL.

Posted by tomdevries on Sep. 25 2006,07:55

You could try formatting your disk with the "HP USB disk storage format tool". It will make a formatted USB disk, with either FAT(16) or FAT32, and make it bootable. It works great here for my USB stick.

Posted by riyadh on Sep. 25 2006,10:12

I tried the HP tool. It also seems to think the drive is about 1 terrabytes in size. (wish it was

). I think there must be something wrong with the geometry information. I have now managed to partition in with fdisk into two partitions which both windows and linux seem to recognize. I use the dsl install to usb zip and I can see the files in windows. There is still a huge about 800000 MB partition visible in disk manager under WinXP. The drive will not boot however.

Posted by tomdevries on Sep. 25 2006,12:12

(1 TB would be very nice idd :P )

Well that seems like a really odd problem.

Maybe you could try to format it in Windows, using the diskmanager, but I'm nog sure if that is going to work.
The DSL installation to a usb drive also changes the geometry of the drive. So It could be that something went wrong there, but I'm not sure :P

Good luck

Posted by humpty on Sep. 25 2006,15:36

Try sfdisk ;
< http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki....endrive >