New Updated Install to Pendrive

Forum: USB booting
Topic: New Updated Install to Pendrive
started by: roberts

Posted by roberts on May 07 2005,05:58

Please see site news for DSL 1.1. As part two of the 1.1 release there are now two new methods to ease the installation of DSL on pendrives. The default one actually auto calculates the geometry needed to boot USB-ZIP, the second one uses the drives native geometry and is available only for those computers that can boot from USB-HDD. For more details please see site news for DSL 1.1

As usual YMMV but these two new scripts have had good results in the testing phase. Either one is callable via the existing menu option Apps->Tools->Install to Pendrive.

Posted by MikeHunt79 on May 07 2005,11:30

This worked a treat on the geometry of my Lexar Jumpdrive Elite 256mb. It actually boots, and I couldn't get it to boot before... but now It won't boot completely... here's what my screen shows:

It looks like it's having problems accessing the "knoppix" file?

Sorry for the image size, I'm in DSL at the moment (from cd), and I don't know how to resize images (yet).

EDIT: Is it possible to have the script make the partition as big as yer pendrive (more than 50mb), as I wanna stick qemu on the drive aswell.

Posted by roberts on May 07 2005,16:09

Mike, try running from a shell. Maybe the script has error'ed out on you.
From the shell prompt

$ dsl-usbinstall

I probably should edit in a bunch of pauses in the script. But you see I always do all of my installs from runlevel 2. But if you run from shell you should not have any quickly disappearing messages.

As to the other question. During testing it was discovered that the auto geometry begins to fail with anything higher than 256MB. So, in order to try to accomodate all sizes of pendrives, it was decided to make a small 50MB fat and the remaining linux. This seemed to work on all the pendrive that were field tested. I still have my original script that works up to 256MB and makes a single fat partition.

Posted by MikeHunt79 on May 07 2005,16:43

I don't think the script error'ed out on me, but I'll run it again from the shell just incase....

I'd love your script fo./mkdiskimage -1 /dev/$DEVICE 50 64 32
r a 256mb partition...
In you script, I noticed the "./mkdiskimage -1 /dev/$DEVICE 50 64 32" seems to make the geometry... I take it this line would have to be modified for different geometry right?

Posted by v_lestat on May 07 2005,18:30

thats the same error i got with 1.0 and the ONLY way to make it stop for me was by NOT copying the BOOT folder to your pen drive

write the image to the pendrive and then copy over ONLY the knoppix and lost found folders

i still had to use frame buffering why i dont know must be the 2005FPW monitor and the dvi connection.

i also wrote the boot iamge to a floppy and boote that way but i copied the entire current.iso to the pen drive.

if i didnt do it one of those 2 ways it wouldnt work.

Posted by MikeHunt79 on May 07 2005,19:41

sounds good v_lestat.... I've made a bit of progress tho... I've found that the "toram" option works....I'm now making one large FAT partition and seeing if that will work or not.

Posted by fcm4711 on May 08 2005,10:02

Hi there

I've successfully setup DSL on an USB pendrive. It works like a charm as long as the pendrive is writeable, but learning about the limited write cycles of an USB pendrive I'd like to use it read only. So I tried to boot with the little switch set to read only. Unfortunatlely I then get the same screen as the one MikeHunt79 posted. I thought there was no need to write to the USB pendrive while booting up? Is there a setting I could change or add to prevent write access while booting?
Thank you in advance.

Felix

Posted by Egroc on May 09 2005,09:10

Hi!

I tried a lot of times to boot from a USB pen. Finally I success to boot from usb using loadlin from dos mode (booting linux directly crashed all times). But I have a problem: when x server is coming up the system halt when graphic mode is trying to initialize. From CD all works ok.

I don't know... ¿Some idea?

Thanks for this incredible distro!!!

Posted by jdiderik on May 13 2005,14:35

I get the same errors MikeHunt79 has in his screenshot (photo,

).
I used the "Install to Pendrive" method, no errors during that script.
Any luck on using a different method described here? Bigger and single FAT partition?
I've got a Storix 128 Mb and I don't know why this is not working...

Posted by v_lestat on May 13 2005,19:44

hit F2 when you guys boot and tell it to use frame buffering FB1024x768
just try it once see what happens.

other than that the only oddity i found was in the syslinux.cfg file it shows the knoppix file as being in the root of the drive which its not, technically, and since linux is exact when it comes to locations.
the knoppix file is actually located in KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX its inside the knoppix folder.
also notice that its case sensative. its not knoppix its KNOPPIX

you may want to boot into your regular OS and change that line to either CAPS or KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX and see whats happening.

i can only boot 2 ways.
1 is if i boot from a floppy using the usbboot.img file, because it knows to look for a pendrive.
or
by copying the files off of the floppy onto the root of the pen drive.

now another thing i mentioned in another thread was the fact that i was not able to boot at all if i copies the boot folder onto the pen drive. once i removed that it started working a little better.
i dont know why but its jsut the way it was.

i know im probably doing things very wrong but thats just my experiences

also if i try to use frugal in the boot command line it will always fail to boot. with the exact same error the other chap has.
i can not use frugal which i thought was the only way to make the pen drive writable.
why is this. and how do i go about properly booting to a writeable pen drive.?

Posted by cbagger01 on May 15 2005,00:00

Robert,

The new USB install to pendrive USBHDD script worked like a charm on my Lexar Secure 1GB drive (thanks again guys - you know who you are).

The standard USBZIP script would not work with my Dell BIOS, but I restored the original Lexar factory raw "dd" image and then tried again with the USBHDD script and it worked fine.

My only advice is that the questions in the usb script were somewhat confusing.

I needed to answer "No" to USBZIP and then a second question appeared and said "Yes" to USBHDD.

I was unsure if the second question was going to appear and I took a best guess and said "No" to the first question.

Otherwise, nice job!

No more playing with Dell USBkey boot utility in Windows any more.

Posted by roberts on May 15 2005,00:54

Thanks for the feedback, cbagger01.
I am glad to hear that we finally have a DSL based solution for you and your Dell BIOS machine.

When others have failures booting their usb memory device, I wish they too would share what brand their BIOS is. What their BIOS options are, etc.

It would be nice to know and document what may work based on the whole picture and not just brand of usb flash memory device.

It has been very challenging to try to understand the requirements and all the parameters that come into play when boot these usb memory devices without the crutch of MS Windows and windows based formatting utilities. But maybe that is wishful thinking going up against the windows monolopy. But I felt these two new versions to install were worth sharing.

Since, I only had a single menu option "Install to Pendrive" and I wanted previous versions of DSL to be able to use these two new scripts, I made answering N to the USBZIP install then download and start the USBHDD script. I know it is not the best. But tried to be backward compatible.

Posted by kitsaros on May 18 2005,04:00

i tried to made an botable usb pen (it was formatted fat32) and all i got is an pen 50 mb instead of 256 . How can at least reformat it with the correct size ?
Thx

Posted by v_lestat on May 18 2005,06:06

you should have 2 partitions if you followed everything correctly.
1 parttion is 50 megs the rest of your pendrive is partitioned out as storage for linux. (i believe thats the right terminology)

Posted by kagelump on May 28 2005,22:35

I was wondering
is it possible to make it so that its
50 mb linux (ext2)
rest is in FAT

so when i plug it into windows, it just sees 1 drive that it can use

actually, is it possible to make it so that it works alongside with being a normal USB thumbdrive (FAT to store files, etc)

edit:
also, if i run the usb-zip script, and I want to restore to the original geometry
am i screwed?

thanks

Posted by 9a6or on May 29 2005,21:19

Windows XP sees only the first partition so there's no point making a large second FAT partition.

I increased the size of the 50MB FAT partition to the maximum 250MB (with USBZIP method) which is now accessible from Win. The rest of the stick is ext2 for dsl extensions and the backup file.

Posted by Hans on June 10 2005,20:27

Quote (MikeHunt79 @ May 07 2005,12:43)

...
I'd love your script fo./mkdiskimage -1 /dev/$DEVICE 50 64 32
r a 256mb partition...
In you script, I noticed the "./mkdiskimage -1 /dev/$DEVICE 50 64 32" seems to make the geometry... I take it this line would have to be modified for different geometry right?

This worked for me. It was exactly what I was looking for.

Now I have a 512MB stick w 2 partitions of ~ 255 of which the first has 200 left as windows compatible FAT.

thx for helping me out, haven't seen any perl scripting (mkdiskimage) before, drove me crazy.

Posted by ke4nt1 on June 10 2005,20:35

Quote (9a6or @ May 29 2005,16:19)

I believe this is only an XP limitation.
W2K, ME, 98, 95, etc.. all can see more than one partition..

I have also adjusted the FIRST number in the mkdiskimage
command, from 50 to 200, which still makes a bootable
partition on sda1.. It seems , that using the "zip" technology
only allows a maximum of 256MB's for booting from the first
partition. ( something about making the blocks to big )

73
ke4nt

Posted by pop on June 17 2005,01:29

put simply, the hardware and software guys
at qnx RTP seem to have at least a partial answer
(dont worry RTP works very much like *Nix).

it may be related to some problems with the geometry of the usb-flash
< http://www.openqnx.com/PNphpBB2-viewtopic-t2882-.html >

fmartens seems to give links to some tools that may help
to reset/format the geometry right ?.

RTP is a VERY cool OS and free to home users/open devs.

Posted by red_parking on June 18 2005,06:19

Quote (roberts @ May 07 2005,12:09)

can i installl to kingston 128 mb?? how