Another USB Booting Problem

Forum: USB booting
Topic: Another USB Booting Problem
started by: rpmiller

Posted by rpmiller on Mar. 18 2005,03:01

I've got a Via Epia 5000 motherboard. I've got DSL going from CD. I've tried several methods to create a bootable USB stick but all have failed. I tried from windows, using the procedure found here in the forums and in the docs. I tried the frugal_usb.sh, I tried the 5_way thing. All write data to the USB and end without errors. But when I set the BIOS to USB-ZIP (or USB-FDD), it immediately goes to DISK BOOT FAILURE, like it's not even trying. My usb stick is a Cruzer Mini, 256 MB.

I've seen that stick mentioned as working as well as my motherboard. What else could the problem be?

Thanks in advance,
Ryan

Posted by rpmiller on Mar. 19 2005,00:24

I see the Epia 5000 is supposed to be compatible with USB booting, but has anyone gotten it to work with this MB and what pen-drive did you use?

Thanks,
Ryan

Posted by rpmiller on Mar. 19 2005,13:11

Well, I got my mini-cruzer 256 to boot with the Epia 5000. I just spent a long time with cfdisk and sfdisk to make sure I had 32 sectors/track and less than 1024 cylinders. I also used the "frugal strikes again!" how-to, although I though I had done those steps before.

Anyway, I'm booting from USB! WOOHOO!

Ryan

Posted by Marco Giardina on Mar. 22 2005,07:56

Hello Ryan,

sorry for my intrusion, but probably i 've the same problem; how do you have partitioning your pen drive with 32 sector and 1024 cylinders limit? I 've follow more time the Damn instruction, but anytime that launch the script 'install on pen drive', the script stopped the goals when launch the command fdosfs; appears brief and fast response of error, and the window closed.

I think may be the problem is the format of the pen, because i can mount the pen at /dev/sda1..

Please can you support me few minutes?
TIA

Marco

Posted by rpmiller on Mar. 22 2005,13:04

Hi Marco,

Well, I'm no expert as I've only gotten the one system to work, and it was my first. Here is what I finally did with my pen drive:

I used a combination of cfdisk and sfdisk, first of all. I used cfdisk (the one with the text/menu driven interface) to delete the existing partition. Then I went to sfdisk and set the drive parms as specified in the docs (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/talk/node/86). I think the important one is the 32 sectors per track. You may be able to just specify that one and let it figure out the heads and cylinders. Since my usb stick is 256 MB, there are less than 1024 cylinders, so I created a single partition that used all the drive. I then went back to cfdisk to make sure it agreed with the settings. I noticed an additional flag set there (CF maybe), so I selected 'maximize' and it went away. Not sure about that one.

Anyway, once the partitioning was done, I followed the instructions from the thread "frugal strikes again":

Setup Instructions:
1. plugin the usb pendrive
2. boot from DSL 0.8.x cdrom
3. At the system menu select Shells->root-access
4. wget < http://ibiblio.org/pub.....tar.gz >
5. mydsl-load frugual_usb.tar.gz
6. frugal_usb.sh

After that, I rebooted with my bios set to USB-ZIP and it worked.

Now, I tried this about 100 times and it would immediately say "INSERT SYSTEM DISK". So often and fast that I thought maybe the hardware was incompatible. But I really think the key is the partitioning and the drive geometry.

There are lots of posts on here with variations on this method, even some windows based ones. I'm going to try another system in the next couple of days and see if I've got it down.

Let me know how it goes!

P.S. It would be really cool if when the system tries to boot and it can't it would add some information about what it was looking for and didn't find. Just a thought with no knowledge of the boot process to go on.

Ryan