Booting from 512MB Cruzer Mini on Shuttle SN45GForum: USB booting Topic: Booting from 512MB Cruzer Mini on Shuttle SN45G started by: francisr Posted by francisr on July 05 2005,18:43
I installed DSL 1.21 on my Cruzer Mini USB stick from Windows by unzipping dsl-embedded.zip to E: and performing "syslinux -s e:". After fooling around with DSL in QEMU for a little while, I then rebooted, set my BIOS to boot from USB-HDD, and booted. The first time I did this, it booted into DSL just fine. DSL worked as expected (and it loaded my configuration from QEMU, very nifty!). However, when I tried to boot it again later, it just dropped me to a limited shell instead of booting! I tried a couple more times and it always dropped me to the limited shell, so I tried out the USB bootdisk image, which also dropped me to the same shell.I tried booting the floppy/USB stick combo from another computer, an old HP Pavilion 8665c, and it booted just fine. Therefore, I think it might be a problem with my specific computer (a Shuttle XPC SN45G). One clue I have noticed is that the green flashing light on the USB stick, which is normally lit, suddenly turns off during the DSL boot stage, specifically when it says "searching for USB devices". If I unplug it and plug it back in again, the light comes back on. In fact, if I unplug the stick as soon as it turns off and plug it back in as soon as possible, DSL sometimes boots! I tried modifying the linuxrc in the boot floppy's minirt24.gz to add a delay where I could unplug and re-plug my USB stick, but it only seemed to work about 1/3 of the times that I tried to boot after doing this. Does anyone know what could be causing this problem? I'm guessing it's my computer; does anyone know of any problems with USB in Linux on Shuttle XPC's? Or perhaps there could be another cause to the problem? Any help would be greatly appreciated, as this bootable USB stick/QEMU idea is certainly very cool and I'd love to get DSL working on my computer and stick. |