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Topic: USB memory sstick drive, Can DSL be run from

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el_supremo Offline

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Posts: 5
Joined: July 2004

Posted: July 05 2004,01:11

Quote

I solved it by modifying linuxrc inside miniroot.gz

Would you explain how you did this? I've unzipped miniroot.gz but at the moment can't figure out how to get inside miniroot.

Thanks
Pete

el_supremo Offline

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: July 05 2004,16:37

Quote (el_supremo @ July 04 2004,21:11)

Quote

I solved it by modifying linuxrc inside miniroot.gz

Would you explain how you did this? I've unzipped miniroot.gz but at the moment can't figure out how to get inside miniroot.
Pete

After web searching (and one false start) I've found out how to modify miniroot and have been trying to boot my USB compactflash card from the bootusb.img on a floppy..
I added /dev/sda to linuxrc but it didn't make any difference.
I also noticed that the file system on my USB card is all lower case and thought that perhaps that might be why linuxrc can't find a directory called KNOPPIX. So I added a bit of script which also looks for /cdrom/knoppix. But that also made no difference.
While running Knoppix I've checked that I can mount /dev/sda1 in the same way that linuxrc does it and it works, but when I try the real thing booting from a floppy linuxrc doesn't find it.

Anyone got any ideas as to what else I could try to fix this?

and a subsidiary question: why can't I create files with upper case names on the USB CF card reader?

Best Wishes
Pete

el_supremo Offline

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: July 07 2004,22:37

FWIW:
After some mucking about I've managed to get the system to use the floppy drive to boot DSL off my old USB1 reader plugged into one of the m/b USB ports. I couldn't get DSL to recognize the USB 2 reader on the USB 2 PCI card.
[edit] *not* DSL - I should have said "linuxrc (on the floppy)".
That's as far as I'll be able to get because the BIOS doesn't seem to have an entry for a USB CF reader - it does have entries for USB ZIP and USB FDD but they don't do anything. Oh well, I've learned how to get at linuxrc within miniroot.

Best Wishes
Pete

87C751

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Joined: July 2004

Posted: Aug. 03 2004,14:21

Great thread! Thanks to you guys, I've got DSL booting off a BusDrive 128MB USB stick.

The interesting bits were: this stick was one of those with no partitions (i.e. /dev/sda), so I had to mod the boot floppy linuxrc. After that, I could get the system booted off the USB boot floppy. But syslinux did not appreciate the structure of the stick, saying 'File syetem " FAT16" not supported' (yes, the leading spaces were inside the double-quotes). I'm guessing the stick's factory formatting job was kind of funky.

For some reason, the Gentoo install on this box doesn't like this memory stick, so I booted the DSL CD, nuked the partition table on the stick and created a new primary. Then rebooted to XP, formatted the stick as FAT, copied the KNOPPIX directory and the boot floppy files and finally ran syslinux.exe. No complaints this round, and when I rebooted with USB booting re-enabled on the mobo, DSL came right up! I'm posting this from USB DSL.

lostcity

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Posts: 36
Joined: July 2004

Posted: Aug. 04 2004,21:48

Quote (roberts @ April 24 2004,10:54)

Sure. First download the DSL bootusb.img from one of the download sites. I would first start by making the boot floppy from this .img file. Next grab your pendrive, you don't need to format it, now copy over the KNOPPIX folder. Next test your setup by booting from the floppy. DSL will run from the USB pendrive. Now, if your machine will boot from USB, copy the contents of the floppy onto the root directory of the pendrive. Do not copy to inside the KNOPPIX folder. Then go grab syslinux from syslinux
You only need to run syslinux with a target of the usb pendrive. On windows for example do syslinux.exe -s E: Where drive E corresponds to your pendrive. Finally change your BIOS to boot from USB. I also had to change my BIOS to usb-keyboard in order for the boot from USB to work.

Sounds good. My question would be how do I get the 1.40 bootusb.img on a 1.38 floppy.

Thanks in advance

--------------
KC8ZTJ
73's

58 replies since April 24 2004,10:38

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