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Topic: cant get dsl to boot, just can't get it done

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fl0p

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Posts: 5
Joined: Oct. 2005

Posted: 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...

RoGuE_StreaK Offline

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Posted: 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.

--------------
"I find your lack of penguin disturbing"
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cbagger01

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Posted: 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.

fl0p

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Joined: Oct. 2005

Posted: 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?

fl0p

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Posts: 5
Joined: Oct. 2005

Posted: 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...

9 replies since Oct. 24 2005,21:02

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