usb booting

Forum: USB booting
Topic: usb booting
started by: hiro protaganist

Posted by hiro protaganist on Oct. 30 2005,09:50

I have been trying to get my computer to boot DSL on a usb pen drive but have had no luck. I have searched the forum but cannot find the answer so maybe someone can help. This may look a long winded post but i wanted to give as much info as possible.

Formatted Crucial 512MB stick to fat (not fat32) using windoze xp.
Booted DSL computer (Asus PCH-DL) to cd, with pen installed, during boot, at autoconfiguring usb devices stage got error saying: Modprobe: Modprobe cannot locate module block-major-2

After boot mounted stick to /mnt/sda1 and all looked fine.

Unmounted stick and ran: Apps/Tools/Install to usb pendrive/for usb-hdd pendrive.

Selected device location as sda, chose install, chose from live cd, chose no boot options (to keep things as simple as possible for now), chose english language.

Got error saying: Error saying total number of sectors not a multiple of sectors per track!
add mtools_skip_check=1 to your .mtoolsrc file to skip this test

Install continues and completes with no more errors. Mounted drive again and it has the following files on it:

boot.cat
boot.msg
f2
f3
german.kbd
linux24
logo16
minirt24.gz
syslinux.cfg
Knoppix folder containing 1 file: knoppix

Rebooted computer, All usb devices are enabled in bios, it is set up to boot to a removable drive first and the hard drive priority section even says: USB-HDD0: crucial usb flash disk 2.0, so i sort of assume that the motherboard should boot ok however when i try i get the error: Not a boot disk insert bootable disk and try again.

Just in case it is important, the mouse is usb (microsoft optical) and there is no place in the bios to enable usb keyboard support (i don't know why that is important but it came up several times while searching the forum). The drive is plugged directly into the back of the computer and i have tried two different sockets. I have tried unplugging the usb mouse and there are no other usb devices on the system. I have turned off the quick post check in the bios.

I have also tried to boot my other computer to the stick with exactly the same result, it is an Asus A7V8X-X.

I hope that is enough information and i hope someone can put me out of my misery!
Many thanks, Hiro.

Posted by usul on Nov. 03 2005,23:50

.

Hiya

You could try the winimage method from this thread....:

< http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....061&st= >

Good luck, hope your USB DSL'ing soon m8

.

Posted by hiro protaganist on Nov. 06 2005,12:28

Many thanks Usul i have tried as you suggested and now have it booting fine from my usbpen. Here are a few notes which may be of interest to those still struggling.
Originally winimage threw an error saying "the current image format is not supported by the disk drive" but when i updated from V6.0 to V8.0 this changed to "the current image format is not supported by the disk drive would you like to resixe now". I selected resize now and the image wrote ok. I then dragged the files from my cd to the pen and booted.
I got the same message as i have always got ie. Non system diisk insert disk and try again, so i did ctrl-alt-del and checked the bios was correct ( it was) and when it restarted after exiting the bios it booted!
Further trials have shown that the boot always fails first time even though i have the quick boot turned off but the second boot always works. Anybody any idea why this is? I'm not bothered as the machine will rarely be rebooted but i am interested.
Well i'm off to add my motherboard to the compatability post, Many thanks to all of you who have helped my with this problem, Hiro.

Posted by vbrtrmn on Nov. 11 2005,17:58

Just a suggestion per your MB requiring you to boot twice. Try flashing your BIOS to the newest version, it may fix the problem.

Posted by mayday on Jan. 01 2006,20:32

I only use winimage to extract the 2 images to the usb memmory

Booted and ruining perfect