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Topic: USB Boot: "Flashy Cursor of Death", Having problems booting from USB stick

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emmet

Group: Members
Posts: 6
Joined: Sep. 2004

Posted: Sep. 08 2004,12:13

First things first.....WOW! I downloaded DSL yesterday and booted from the CD on my Dell Latitude D800 and it is _just_ amazing. It detected almost all the hardware on this machine (with the exception of a weird security card reader that I never use). Well done to everyone who has worked long and hard to get this working. Thanks.

Okay, now for the problem that I have. I've been reading through the posts on this board, and noticed that someone else had (what they call) a "Flashy Cursor of Death". Let me explain.

I've gone through all the instructions to create a boot image on the USB. I've formatted it as Type 6 (took me a little while to find out what that meant) and I've sucessfully booted from the USB by using the CD-ROM as the first step and then the options to continue booting from the USB. So, this works.

The problem is that when I try and boot directly from the USB, it flashes during the POST (so it has been detected by the BIOS) and then all I get is a flashing _ cursor at the top-left of the screen. Nothing else...it just sits there.

Now, I noticed that when booting from the CD-ROM, it also gives the flashing cursor, but just for half-a-second or so, and then bootstraps into Linux.

Does anyone have any words of advice for me here? I'm now at a loss at what to try.

Many thanks in advance,

Emmet

ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Sep. 08 2004,16:01

Post up your output of "cfdisk /dev/sda"
The USBkey boot is particular about your partitioning..

73
ke4nt

SaidinUnleashed Offline

Group: Members
Posts: 1428
Joined: Mar. 2004

Posted: Sep. 08 2004,16:43

YAY!!! i got my generic usb drive to work!! but the lexar one is still teh death.

on topic, though, i used to have to manually syslinux my drive several times to get it to work. i guess sometimes it just doesn't take on the first try.

but the script works great on my generic one! *celebrates*

-J.P.
SaidinUnleashed

--------------
They say if you play a Microsoft CD backwards, you hear satanic messages. That's nothing, cause if you play it forwards, it installs Windows.

Unleash the power of the TILDE~~~

ke4nt1

Group: Members
Posts: 2329
Joined: Oct. 2003

Posted: Sep. 08 2004,18:12

As long as you have the logic of the drive reading 32 sectors/track, the frugal_usb script works fine...

I had to use "sfdisk S 32 /dev/sda" to get the c,h,s to be correct,
Probably from repartioning and reformatting my USBkey for other things prior to using it under linux..

When I would run either fdisk or cfdisk, it would partition to a 64 sector/track count all by itself.. Then no bootski ..
Time and time again I tried to repartition and reformat.. type 6 , type 4 , all nogo ..
The boot would either error out with a " boot failed " error, or the blinky, blinky, blinky cursor..

As my key is 512MB, another obstacle is the cylinder count .. With 32 sectors/track , I have 1982 cylinders ..
Dos limit of 1024 is in effect for a type 6 partition, so I made 2 partitions, and all was right with the world.

sda1 = 75 MB , great for upgrading to the next DSL version
Nothing here but the DSL install ..

sda2 = 425MB , every extension to date under " /optional ", dsl-dpkg, gnu-utils, and dsl-aterm in the / ,
The boot*.img's, frugal scripts, a few mp3's, and some personal files in /storage .. Even room left for a backup.tar.gz !

Once you have the USBkey booting properly, and working fine, full of files, mail, backups, personal files, etc ,
another version of DSL will rollout to the masses .. :-) Then, you will want to upgrade your key to the latest version ..

Running the frugal_usb.sh again won't work, because the script looks for an unformatted partition before installing to sda1 ..
I didn't want to repartition the key again for fear of losing all my stuff in sda2, or having the sector/track count jump to
64 again.. , and end up with a non-booting keydrive. Remember the issues about partitioning " out-of-order " ?
I didn't want to delete sda1 , leaving sda2, then try to come in before sda2, and make a new sda1 , which would actually be
created AFTER sda2.. I seen screwy things happen with that situation.. cfdisk reads " partitions are out of order " , etc...

So, I commented out the mkdosfs command and the if statements to detect the formatted partition in frugal_usb.sh.
( it was already correct, right? )
Then I deleted all the existing files out of the sda1 partition. Ran the edited frugal_usb.sh, and boom, upgraded and bootable.
And all my stuff on sda2 was untouched .
Bootup with " dsl dma toram mydsl=sda2 restore=sda2 " and " playtime " !!

I've done it twice now, with different versions of DSL. Works great..
I am hoping someone will duplicate my efforts here, and verify my findings..

73
ke4nt

emmet

Group: Members
Posts: 6
Joined: Sep. 2004

Posted: Sep. 08 2004,19:30

Thanks for the hints!

I found that I had 56 sectors per track, so I learnt how to use sfdisk (I think) and reformatted the key with two partitions (thanks for the hint ke4nt). The problem is that I still can't boot (flashy cursor).

As requested, here is the output of cfdisk:

Disk Drive: /dev/sda
Size: 262144000 bytes, 262 MB
Heads: 9 Sectors per Track: 32 Cylinders: 1777
sda1 Boot Primary FAT16 51.61
sda2 Primary FAT16 210.42

Is there anything else that I can do, except break down in a heap on the floor?

Thanks

Emmet

30 replies since Sep. 08 2004,12:13

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