User Feedback :: USB Boot: "Flashy Cursor of Death"

Here you are:

Disk /dev/sda: 262 MB, 262144000 bytes
9 heads, 56 sectors/track, 1015 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 504 * 512 = 258048 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 233 58688 6 FAT16
/dev/sda2 234 1015 197064 b Win95 FAT32

I hope that this is useful

Emmet

Thanks, very good info ..
One more thing ..
What USB item did you set your BIOS to
USB-ZIP, USB-FDD, USB HDD,
USB-DOS, or USBKeyboard enabled?

73
ke4nt

Hi,

The entry in my BIOS is "USB Storage Device"

The computer is a Dell Latitude D800 (about 10 months old)
BIOS version A09

I hope this helps,

Emmet

when I try booting I recieve the error Strike F1 to retry boot, F2 for setup utility I have been trying forever and it is starting to drive me crazy~! Help would be greatly appreciated

Hi.

I am doing some experimenting with USB flash drives, Dell Computers (in this case a 400SC and a GX260) and DSL. The original DSL frugal usb install method did not work even after I got rid of the error message by deleting and re-partitioning my drive in Linux using fdisk.

I do not have a polished solution yet but I can report on my progress so far.

First, the hardware:
Sandisk Cruzer Micro 128MB USB2.0 flash drive
Dell Poweredge 400SC server with A05 BIOS

Then, the BIOS settings changes I made:

"Hard-Disk Drive Sequence" order of priority:
1. USB Device
2. System BIOS Boot Devices

"Boot Sequence"
1. Diskette
2. CDROM
3. Hard Drive

LegacySelect: "USB Emulation" = ON

"Fast Boot" = OFF

OK, now the flash drive preparations:

1. Download and install the Dell memory key boot utility program. This program will format many USB flash devices, not just the "Dell" branded ones. Get it here at: http://www.bay-wolf.com/utility/usb_memkey.zip

2. Use the program to format your flash drive and make it bootable. It will create a FREEDOS bootable flash drive.

3. Copy the "\knoppix" directory from your DSL livecd over to the flash drive.

4. Download the DSL 0.8 usb boot floppy image:
http://ibiblio.org/pub....0.8.img

5. Download and install a floppy image writer program like rawrite32. It can be found here: http://www.duskware.com/download/rawrite.zip

6. Use the rawrite32 program to create a floppy image. FIRST INSERT A BLANK FLOPPY DISK. Then select the image file from step 5 by choosing "*.* All Files" from the open file dialog box filter. The image will immediately be written out to your floppy disk.

7. Copy the "linux24" and "minirt24.gz" files from the floppy over to your flash drive.

8. Download and unzip the loadlin DOS linux loader program. It is located here: http://public.planetmirror.com/pub/looplinux/loadlin.zip

9. Copy the unzipped files over to your flash drive.

10. Reboot the computer. Immediately press the F12 key on bootup.

11. Your flash drive LED should light up. If not, try using the rear USB ports on your computer instead of the front ones. You also may need to turn on USB legacy keyboard emulation in your BIOS. If it lights up properly, choose the "USB device" option from the boot menu.

12. You should then see the FREEDOS bootup messages and eventually you will get to a good old DOS "C:\" prompt.

13. Type in the following at the C:\ prompt:
C:\loadlin.exe linux24 /dev/ram rw initrd=minirt24.gz

And DSL should begin to boot up. Once I figure out loadlin a little more I will create an AUTOEXEC.BAT file and a parameters file to automatically boot up DSL with the proper boot command line parameters, but I haven't gotten that far yet.

FYI, with these BIOS settings you should be able to automatically boot up with your flash drive by just plugging it in and turning the computer on. In other words, the F12 boot menu step is probably uneccessary.

Hope this helps.

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