USB boot with AMIBIOS v.3.2

Forum: USB booting
Topic: USB boot with AMIBIOS v.3.2
started by: dinges

Posted by dinges on May 03 2005,10:07

I had my USB pen all set to be booted from. That was the easy part. Well done DSL, setting up my internet connection with DHCP and then getting the files from ibiblio!

But my quite recent AMIBIOS 3.2 would not boot from the USB pen. FIsrt of all I had to remeber not to use my external hub, for the bios doesn't even know that there is a USB pen available. So putting the pen in on of the USB port on the computer directly took care of that. When I booted with F11 the USB boot option was available. After a google search I saw somewhere mentioned that you have to turn on the bios option 'USB Device Legacy support=All devices' (it's in ' Integrated peripherals'). After that I was the proud owner of a working linux system on a USB pen. Wonderful!

I hope to be able to help a lot of friends with compter problems. Formerly I used the knoppix CD, and I won't dispose of it. But I find the stick easier to use.

Posted by v_lestat on May 06 2005,13:36

i have mine set up as legacy it sees the pen drive fine. but it says invalid system disk whenever i try to boot to it.
ive tried telling it to emulate a floppy cdrom hard drive force fdd and auto and none of them work. it just says invalid system disk.
one thing i noticed and maybe its just me but when i told winimage to write the boot image to the PNY 256meg Thumb drive it never did anything, i know the image is so small you may not see anything happen but it didnt even blink. nothing so i can only assume that its installing the boot image correctly after i tell it to ignore the drive size that doesnt match the boot image.

another thing. my ASUS K8N-E deluxe bios wont allow you to use emulation on the thumb drive if you choose USB 2.0 even if legacy is enabled. you cant even boot to it when choose the boot menu at the POST screen. odd that they wouldnt support legacy 2.0 only legacy 1.1 usb devices. could that possibly be why my PNY drive isnt booting, as its being forced to USB 1.1 and not allowed to run full USB 2.0

i really liked xdsl on my xbox aside from everything being ungodly huge, so much that you cant hardly use anything as it takes up your entire screen and infact goes off the screen and you cant move or resize many windows because of this.

anyways how are you telling the bios to use your USB drive ? jsut leave emulation to auto or telling it that the thumb drive is a cd or floppy or hard drive ?

Posted by v_lestat on May 06 2005,14:10

ok wth lol how come everytime i post something i get one step further than i was prior to posting lol

ok i got it to boot but then it says it cant find any of the mount points or any of the files its looking for.
but i did 2 things so ill retest to see which one made it work
first when i wrote the boot image to the drive i told it to resize it.
next i simply extracted the boot image to the root of the thumb drive then i extracted the current.iso to the root of the thumb drive.
it booted and when it asked for regular boot or boot options i just told it to boot normal.
it then went on a search and destroy mossion looking thru all available mount points looking for the linux files it needed and then didnt find them.
wierd.

Posted by v_lestat on May 06 2005,15:45

ok well here is what ive got so far and its getting close

i write the boot image to the flash drive and tell it yes when it says to enlarge the file. but whats odd is that it simply writes the files to the root of the drive.
ok i then open current.iso and copy the KNOPPIX and lost+found folder and the intex.htm file but NOT the boot folder. if i do that the system tries to boot and says kernel panic and then refuses to go any further

ok using the system like i mentioned i get all the way thru the boot process and then it says initialising runlevel 5 and then i get a black screen. and thats all nothing more
ive tried xset vga=normal and frugal and all 3 of them together and nothing helps.

anyone know why this is doing this and what i can do to make the system boot all the way
the monitor is getting a signal as its not going into power save mode which is good but its just a black screen.

Posted by dinges on May 10 2005,09:32

to: v_lestat

Sorry for the long wait. I got no mail signifying that there was a reaction. Perhaps I should set that up.

It seems to me that the way you create your dsl on the pendrive is the problem. From your writings I gather that you are working with virtual disks under windows. I tried that too but it didn't work for me.

The easiest way to get a working pendrive is by booting from a cd with a dsl iso burned on it. Download the dsl-1.0.1.iso and burn it with nero or another prgogram that can do that. Use a cd-rw for you will never use the bootable cd again. If you only have a linux box, tell me so and I will help you further.

After dsl has booted, choose menu->apps->tools->Install to USB Pendrive. Assuming that your pendrive is the only one, then 'sda' is the device to choose when asked.

You will need an active internet connection, otherwise the shell script will abort silently while it cannot download frugal_usb.tar.gz and subsequent files. If you don't have an active internet connection while using dsl, download frugal_usb.tar.gz separately, unpack it and study the script. You can do the install manually.

Keep me informed. I hope you succeed.

Posted by v_lestat on May 10 2005,21:07

actually no i was following the instructions to a T according to how to set up a usb booting DSL

i can boot to it but it simply tells me it cant find the knoppix folder(there is another guy here who posted screen shots of what happens and its exactly the same screen i see)
the only way for me to boot properly is with a floppy and then i MUST use frame buffering
why ? only thing i can figure is because im using a Dell 2005FPW LCD.

i dont care to always have to unlpug my USB hub either, kind of sucks but i can live with it until someone fixes that.

i can boot to it using the floppy but right now i cant get my nforce 3 network card installed, i have thread here asking for help but no one has responded as of yet.