boot from floppy

Forum: USB booting
Topic: boot from floppy
started by: dinges

Posted by dinges on May 11 2005,20:23

I could not find a discription in the forum what to do when your old laptop has an USB port, but doesn't support booting from USB. So I found out, and this is how to do it.

Extract: Create a floppy with a fat16 file system. Copy the contents of the root of the pendrive with the dsl on it, so everything except the /knoppix directory. Change some content of syslinux.cfg. Set your laptop to boot from floppy with the pendrive in the USB port.

1) Create a floppy with a fat16 file system. Do not mount the floppy. I thought it would be easy, but it wasn't. The normal way is "/sbin/mkfs.msdos /dev/fd0", but this didn't work for me, and besides, dsl doesn't have it. So I used fdisk: /sbin/fdisk. Make a new primary partition, change the system id to 6 (fat16), set the boot flag to 'on'. Check with 'p'. Write the file system to disk.

2) Mount the pendrive with the dsl system on it: mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sda1. Mount the floppy: mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy. If you do this from a dsl from the pendrive, then sda1 is already mounted as /cdrom.

3) Copy the contents of /mnt/sda1 to /mnt/floppy: cp /mnt/sda1/* /mnt/floppy. Only the knoppix directory will not be copied.

4) Change the contents of /mnt/floppy/syslynux.cfg with an asci editor e.g. beaver.
a) change 'DEFAULT LINUX24' to 'DEFAULT dsl'
b) remove the full first line that starts with APPEND
c) remove the last line starting with 'LABEL userdef'
c) change all 'BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix' to 'BOOT_IMAGE=/dev/sda1/knoppix'

5) umount /mnt/floppy and /mnt/sda1.

You're done.
Any comment is appreciated.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on May 11 2005,23:37

or, you could just use the bootusb.img in the current/ directory of the mirrors...

Posted by dinges on May 12 2005,14:24

Wonderful. But how is one supposed to know with the information scattered all over the the forum? I at least could not find a quick answer to my problem. It's been days before I found a solution for my USB boot problem with AMIBIOS but not in the DSL forums. Is there an article describing the do's en dont's of DSL? I was amazed to find out that there is not one howto for installing DSL. But there are several in the forum each describing some solution. For such a wonderful thing as a complete Linux system on a pendrive there should also be a howto with lots of common problems and solutions. For instance, yesterday I tried to install DSL 1.1 on my pendrive using the script on the CD. I could not even get past the boot sequence after that, so I copied back the old files. This stumps me.

BTW is there a way to see which version of DSL I'm using? Ans what the differences are between the versions?

I nkow, I know. Write the howto yourself you will say. But I'm just a DSL beginner and my howto would be full of gaps and errors.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on May 12 2005,23:48

Had you even considered looking in the Documentation section linked on the front page?

We have how-tos for almost every way to boot, install and run DSL.

Check it out!

Posted by roberts on May 13 2005,00:12

Updated boot floppy images have been posted.
Please see site news for more details.

Posted by v_lestat on May 13 2005,12:58

my system boots to a usb device but it would never work for me (DSL would alwyas say it couldnt find the knoppix files)all i did was take the usbboot image and write it to a floppy and it boot directly to the floppy and then went automatically to the usb device.

there is no need to go thru all that in order to boot to a usb device where the bios doesnt support usb booting.

Posted by dinges on May 14 2005,09:14

Quote

Had you even considered looking in the Documentation section linked on the front page?

Thank you for the kind reply. I hadn't seen it yet. Now I have. It's extensive. And indeed, just a dd with bootxx.img is enough. I am very happy with dsl.