cant get dsl to bootForum: USB booting Topic: cant get dsl to boot started by: fl0p Posted by fl0p on Oct. 24 2005,21:02
I finally managed to get dsl installed to my 256 mb usb stick by booting from the cd and going the standard apps/tools/install to pendrive/usb hdd way.The donwside of this is, that my stick is no longer accessible from windows (windows tells me its not formated). This kinda pisses me off, cuz I'd like to still be able to use my stick as a storage device from within windows.. any way to do that? Another (and more pressing) problem is, that I cannot get my stick to boot. The standard installation mentioned aboves seems to work fine and it says usb install complete at the end. But when i restart my PC with the stick connected it doesn't seem to recognize the usb stick at all... I've the following boot devices in my bios: Lan, floppy, ls120 (whatever that is), hdd-0..3, cdrom, scsi, zip100, usb-fdd, usb-cdrom, usb-hdd. I assume it should be usb-hdd. Just to be sure I set my first to third boot devices to usb-hdd, usb-fdd and usb-cdrom. When restarting I see my usb-stick's led flash 2 times whereafter I get a 'no-system disk insterted' error (so it doesnt seem to find any operating system) I've no clue why it won't work.... Thx for suggestions in advance... Posted by RoGuE_StreaK on Oct. 24 2005,21:55
Don't know about the second, as for the first, you could partition the drive so that you have, say, 55MB for DSL, and the rest formated as FAT32, which is accessable by both DSL and windows. From what I've heard, don't make a swap partition on there, as flash drives don't like that many rewrites.Another possible option, which I think would probably also need partitioning anyway, is that I think there are some 3rd party file explorers for windows that can see and write to Ext2 formatted drives. I think Ext3 accessability in windows (non-natively) is kinda like linux and NTFS, it's partly supported, but not fully yet. Posted by cbagger01 on Oct. 24 2005,22:16
The USBHDD install script SHOULD create a single FAT partition on your USB thumbdrive.This partition should be usable by both Windows and Linux. Posted by fl0p on Oct. 24 2005,22:31
where can i find this usbhdd script?in case zou mean the standard install procedure i described above: after thatmz usbstick seems still to be empty...... it looks like the script would outomount it to /mnt/pendrive...... but if ido an ls in there it seems to be empty.... if i try fdisk /dev/sda i get cannot open device if i try mount /dev/sda /mnt/sda1 i get onlz root can do that if i try sudo mount /dev/sda /mnt/sda1 i get you must specifz the filesystem type if i try sudo mount -t msdos /dev/sda /mnt/sda1 i get mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda, bash: mount:: command not found same with -t vfat is this the way it is supposed to be? Posted by fl0p on Oct. 25 2005,07:27
As for the Fat partition, it seems to be there now....I can access my stick in windows and there seems to be a knoppix installation on it. But it still won't boot.... The stick just isnt recognized no matter what boot device (see above) I chose. Do I have to make the stick bootable manually after installing dsl on it or something like that? ty in advance... Posted by cbagger01 on Oct. 26 2005,16:31
If you chose the install to USBHDD pendrive script from the menu, it should automatically be made bootable.However, you also need to enable USB booting in your computer's BIOS menu Posted by fl0p on Oct. 26 2005,18:33
I tried a different PC (an older one though).Here I was able to select 'USB-ZIP' as a boot device. It now seems to recognize my usb stick as a bootable device, but all I get is a message saying 'boot failed'. Pressing any key just outputs more 'boot failed.' messages - all I can do is ctrl-alt-del into a reboot. EDIT: I tried the USB-ZIP install method. Installation looked, ok, I booted once more (still with boot device set to usb zip) and it seems to work now..... Back in windows I noticed that my 256 Megs USB stick has only 2 of 50 Megs free. Is there any way to still make use of the 'missing' 200 Megs while remaining bootable? once more ty in advance... Posted by cbagger01 on Oct. 26 2005,21:44
It should be possible to create a single partition size of 250MB for a fake ZIP drive (IE, USBZIP) and install both the DSL files and also use the same partition for your backups and restores.In the distant past in order to to backup/restores in DSL, you needed to have a second data partition. This arrangement was usually: 1st Partition: 50MB FAT partition for the DSL system files (\KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX, etc) 2nd Partition: 200MB Linux EXT2 partition for the DSL backup/restore space. However, MS Windows has two problems with this arrangement: 1) Windows can only display the contents of a USB drive's 1st partition only. 2) Windows cannot understand how to read/write to a Linux EXT2 partition. But in newer versions of DSL, you CAN backup and restore to the same data partition as long as the cheatcode "frugal" was added to the default list of boot parameters. So it should be possible to repartition your USB drive so that it has a single 250MB FAT data partition, with backup/restore set to device "sda1" and the rest will be available for storage in both Windows and in Linux. However, you do lose the 6MB at the end of the drive because the original ZIP format was 250MB and not 256MB Unless someone has a script to do this automatically, you will need to manually do this using utilities like sudo cfdisk /dev/sda and 1) Install dosfstools from the myDSL respository and sudo mkfs -t msdos /dev/sda1 and then manually copy over the livecd files, making sure that KNOPPIX\KNOPPIX is all uppercase letters. Finally, edit the syslinux.cfg file so that the word "frugal" is added to the append lines It is not for the faint of heart, but I am confident that it can be done. Posted by fl0p on Oct. 29 2005,19:50
Ok, I'm done with the usb-zip install since I know for sure It won't work on one of my machines. So I'm back at trying to make a usb-hdd installation work.My situation is this: I set first boot device to 'USB-HDD' in my freshly flashed phoenix bios. I booted the livecd, installed dsl to my pendrive with apps\tools\install to pendrive\usb-hdd install. Installation is completed successfully. I reboot. I see the bios recognizes the usb stick, since it appears in the device listing, but still it doesn't boot of it. I can mount my pendrive under linux and access it from windows just fine, cfdisk /dev/sda shows a single bootable fat16 partition. When mounted, an ls on the pendrive gives me this: -- KNOPPIX f2 ldlinux.sys minirt24.gz boot.cat f3 linux24 syslinux.cfg boot.msg german.kbd logo.16 -- (looks okay from what i know) the syslinux.cfg looks like this: -- DEFAULT linux24 APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt24.gz nomce noapic quiet frugal restore=sda1 frugal BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix TIMEOUT 300 PROMPT 1 DISPLAY boot.msg F1 boot.msg F2 f2 F3 f3 LABEL dsl KERNEL linux24 APPEND ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=us apm=power-off vga=791 initrd=minirt24.gz nomce noapic quiet frugal restore=sda1 frugal BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix ... -- Why won't it boot? Am I missing some important point? thx in advance. Posted by cbagger01 on Oct. 30 2005,06:03
No, you are doing everything right.At this point, your device should "just boot". However, I have noticed a few related BIOS parameters that have affected my USB boots in the past. 1) Disable "quick boot" or "fast boot" if such an option exists in the BIOS 2) Enable USB keyboard emulation. 3) Try plugging the drive into the rear USB ports on your computer instead of any front mounted ones. Also, don't use a USB hub in-between your pendrive and your PC. If you suspect the pendrive is the problem, try booting it up from another (different model) computer system that supports USB booting. Other than this, I am out of advice on the subject. |