How to build an USK key BIOS boot USB-FDD ?

Forum: USB booting
Topic: How to build an USK key BIOS boot USB-FDD ?
started by: bcostacurta

Posted by bcostacurta on Dec. 11 2008,19:46

Hello,

how to build an USK key compatible with BIOS supporting only USB-FDD ?

The default system in DSL only allow creation of and UDB-HDD (hard disk) compatible USK key.
However my thin client box only supports UDB-FDD (floppy disk) and so doesn't accept this default DSL USB key.

Thanks for any help or method to follow.

Bye,
Bruno

Posted by John on Dec. 13 2008,00:29

USB booting could be very tricky. I am not sure if it will work specifically with UDB-FDD, but I've found that the way that works with most bios is to have a very small bootable partition on the pen drive (<200MB). You cold do this with cfdisk; cfdisk -z /dev/sda. I usually use the rest of the drive for storage. So, there will be, for example sda1 and sda2, both set up with a dos partition in cfdisk.

Here is a copy of the script I use after that:
mkdosfs /dev/sda1
sleep 3
mkdosfs /dev/sda2
sleep 3
ms-sys -s /dev/sda
sleep 3
#mount -t vfat /dev/sda2 /mnt/sda2
#unzip dsl-X.XX-embedded.zip -d /mnt/sda2/
mount /dev/sda1
sleep 3
unzip dsl-4.4-embedded.zip -d /mnt/sda1/
sleep 3
syslinux -s /dev/sda1

While this setup has the drawback of having a second which isn't accesible via windows, I've found that it works on more computers than the standard DSL USB install. Maybe give it a shot?