Boot USB CD from hard drive bootloader?Forum: USB booting Topic: Boot USB CD from hard drive bootloader? started by: miamicanes Posted by miamicanes on Mar. 05 2007,21:03
I have a tablet PC that can only boot from its internal hard drive, its nonexistent internal IDE CD, or its nonexistent internal floppy connected via an exotic, proprietary cable (resembling the plastic-tape cables used to connect laptop motherboards to TFT displays). It does, however, have Windows XP installed, and has both USB & PCMCIA ports free. I can easily use it to copy files to the drive (I have both USB and PARIDE external CD-rom drives, plus a PCMCIA 2-gig microdrive and a pair of 512mb flash drives... one PCMCIA, one USB)Assuming I can use Partition Magic to shrink the existing NTFS partition and create new unformatted partitions for /boot (ext-2, /dev/hda2, ~64mb), / (ext-3, /dev/hda3, ~8gb), and swap (/dev/hda4, 256mb), is there any good way to actually install GRUB, create the filesystems, and copy the files from within Windows? Posted by humpty on Mar. 06 2007,15:27
not with XP i don't think.(say thanks to microsoft !) what i gather is you don't have the proprietry floppy nor cdrom drive to boot it. if it was me. i'd try to find a way to remove the hard disk and plug it into another machine where one can do things. Posted by Jasper on Mar. 09 2007,06:50
If you are in a network there might be a way (though I have no clue how to do this, I have read about it once)
Posted by curaga on Mar. 09 2007,11:36
You could run DSL in qemu, but you couldn't install it (or touch the HD anyway) from there, since it's in its own sandbox...I think Jasper meant a network PXE boot, would that be possible? A good solution, but you need another linux machine in your LAN: make the partitions. get < NBD server for windows > start it with nbdsrvr \\.\PHYSICALDRIVE0 9000 2 This will share the second partition (hda2) over NBD on port 9000. Check your firewall doesn't block it.. Then on the linux system: nbd-client <server-ip> 9000 /dev/nd0 now you can format it, i.e. mke2fs /dev/nd0 and also move anything you like to it (after mount of course) Do this for all the partitions..... Only remaining thing is the bootloader. Got it! While your boot partition is exported, you CAN install grub to it! And then use XP's bootloader to chainload grub. If you need more specific instructions, just ask Posted by curaga on Mar. 09 2007,12:12
*removed double post*
Posted by squidx on Mar. 30 2007,15:55
This may be interesting to you: I accidentally installed grub on my laptop (IBM T42/broken cd-r). Now everytime I boot, I need to enter some grub code, because I cannot yet figure out where the menu.lst is and how to get at it from within Windows. I'm trying to figure out how the grub landed on my hd0 instead of only on the USB flash, but I'm living proof you can do it. Alex Posted by arewhyainn on April 01 2007,06:55
there is a version of grub that can be install on a ntfs or fat < http://www.geocities.com/lode_leroy/grubinstall/ > . you don't need to edit your partition just your boot.ini file. Posted by Juanito on April 01 2007,10:23
I had a similar situation to this with an old desktop - you don't mention it, but can your BIOS boot from a USB stick?If so, you can boot from the USB stick, shrink your NTFS partition with ntfsprogs, repartition/format the hd and make a hd install. Posted by squidx on April 01 2007,19:37
Thanks for the suggestions -- I ultimately got the IBM rescue CD working on an old Mac CD-R that I frankensteined into a USB HDD. I then was able to reset my mbr in about 2 seconds, so now life is good - if the usb stick is in the drive when I boot, it starts up DSL, when it's not, I'm in my old XP. My original comment was for miamicanes -- just to say that it *is* definitely possibile to install grub on windows without messing with partitions, because I did it -- inadvertently! (I recommend copying your boot.ini first, just for safety's sake) Oh, and that grub version came from the DSL site someplace. If you need to know where, I could try to reconstruct my process. Alex |