Realtek gets in teh way of USB boot

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Realtek gets in teh way of USB boot
started by: Arithmomaniac

Posted by Arithmomaniac on Dec. 01 2006,21:05

Hello. I have an Acer Aspire 1640 with a DaneElec 256MB USB Kay. Arithmomaniac932: I used the Syslinux/DSL combo to get my BIOS to boot thius far:

For realtek rtl8139(x)/8130/810x pci fast ethernet controller....
client mac addr: 88 16 36 14 E5 92 etc.
no boot filename recieved
pxe-mof exiting pxe rom
operating system not dound

On another computer, it skips step 2

What can I do?

Posted by roberts on Dec. 01 2006,22:51

From the output posted looks like an attempt to do a PXE boot.
Are you sure your BIOS is not set to do a "network" boot?

USB boot needs to be higher up the list than network boot. However on some machines network boot is the failsafe and is attemped when all other boot devices fail.

Posted by Arithmomaniac on Dec. 03 2006,01:43

Quote (roberts @ Dec. 01 2006,17:51)

From the output posted looks like an attempt to do a PXE boot.
Are you sure your BIOS is not set to do a "network" boot?

USB boot needs to be higher up the list than network boot.

USB HDD hard drive boot is the highest thing on the list - I even put the floppy and CD boots below.

Posted by Arithmomaniac on Dec. 07 2006,04:54

I looked further into this and came up with the following conclusions:

I can't boot from the USB, network is a last resort

Yet I don't have a CD burner to make a USB boot disk

Also, I would rather keep my DSL installation as small as possible, so I want to avoid dsl-embedded if it will not zip itself back up

What can I do?

Posted by roberts on Dec. 07 2006,06:30

You don't need a CD burner to make a floppy.
The boot floppies are available as a separate download.
Writing the image to an actual floppy is in the Wiki.

Posted by ^thehatsrule^ on Dec. 07 2006,13:44

Any DSL frugal installation boots off compressed containers anyways - having it in one zip won't get you any size differences - its like that for easy transfer. (not to mention you'd have to have something else read that zip beforehand, and extract it anyways.. etc.) Of course dsl-embedded comes with qemu related stuff that you may delete if you don't need it.

Posted by Arithmomaniac on Dec. 08 2006,17:10

I got advice to use the HP boot utility, so I did.

I ran it to make a USB HDD, and then dragged knoppix.img fom the embedded version of DSL onto it.

It boots, but only takes me to the Bash command line.

a) What do I do at that point?
b) What other files am I missing to make a normal boot?

Thanks,
Arithmomaniac