FAT with 2048b block size bootable ?


Forum: USB booting
Topic: FAT with 2048b block size bootable ?
started by: SkizoRutabaga

Posted by SkizoRutabaga on Feb. 19 2007,16:08
Hi people,

I have a 2GB USB pen drive and I want to make it bootable with dsl.
I am not able to format a spartition with other blocksize than 2048 bytes (even a small partition)  and it seems that sylinux doens't like it :
Code Sample
#  syslinux /dev/sda1
syslinux: only 512-byte sectors are supported


Does someone know how to solve this ? Is it actualy possible to make such a partition bootable ?

Thank you

Posted by ~thc on Feb. 19 2007,16:51
syslinux is to blame. it will not work on usb drives
- with a sector size other than 512 byte
- with a partition id other than 0x06 (old fat16)
- with a cluster size greater than 16384 bytes (=> 1 GB size limit)
- with a geometry exceeding 1024 cylinders

Posted by Juanito on Feb. 19 2007,17:57
But... you can download and compile a more modern version of Syslinux that will work with FAT32 partitions (or you can use Syslinux under windows).
Posted by ~thc on Feb. 19 2007,19:51
yes - fat32 support was introduced to syslinux 3.00 - but the 1 GB limit and the 1024 cylinder limit are still in effect.
Posted by Juanito on Feb. 20 2007,02:54
I have a 1GB USB stick that I partitioned in two that works fine with DSL-N and a 512MB USB stick that works fine in one single partition with DSL.

Maybe you could divide your USB stick into several partitions?

Posted by SkizoRutabaga on Feb. 20 2007,08:13
Thank you for your answers. This is just what I suspected.

I'm afraid that partitionning is not to blame. I already made a 250MB bootable partition but I was unable to make a 512b sector sized FAT16.

If I can't run syslinux on this key, is there an alternative method to put a bootable dsl on it ? Maybe from iso version of dsl ?

Posted by humpty on Feb. 20 2007,12:42
use Gparted.
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