How can I boot from USB flash, when no option in BIOS

Booting, installing, newbie
Post Reply
Message
Author
ackptui
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu 11 Oct 2012, 18:10

How can I boot from USB flash, when no option in BIOS

#1 Post by ackptui »

Just had the entrails exposed (IBM Aptiva 2170-800 AMD K2-6) and put in a multiple USB PCI card and a used 80GB PATA HDD. The old HDD was so loud that the disk seeks made it sound like a popcorn popper, so great improvement there towards "silent running." The USB PCI card had an internal port on it, so I hung an old mp3 player that went thru the wash and no longer functions, but on which the flash still works. The BIOS only has options to boot from CD, FDD, and HDD, so no way to boot the flash. Is there a way to put a bootloader on the HDD that would immediately look to the flash to continue the boot, to get around the BIOS limitations?

amigo
Posts: 2629
Joined: Mon 02 Apr 2007, 06:52

#2 Post by amigo »

Yes, you must put a bootloader on the HDD -or on FDD or CD. Then you place the linux kernel and initrd on the same drive. So, from the machiens point of view, it 'boots' the bootloader, which loads and boots the kernel and initrd. In Puppy terminology this would be like a frugal install. But any distro can be made to boot this way -even ones which normally use no initrd. In this case, though, a minimal initrd would be required as it must look for the linux installation and munt that as the 'root' filesystem. So, your machine cannot be made USB-bootable, but by putting the kernel and initrd on a drive which your machine does recognize, the kernel can be loaded along with this minimal initrd.

Les Kerf
Posts: 317
Joined: Sun 24 Jun 2012, 13:30

#3 Post by Les Kerf »

Try the PloP Boolmanager. It can be used on a floppy, cd, or installed to your HDD and will allow booting from USB.
Les

User avatar
darkcity
Posts: 2534
Joined: Sun 23 May 2010, 19:16
Location: near here
Contact:

#4 Post by darkcity »


User avatar
rcrsn51
Posts: 13096
Joined: Tue 05 Sep 2006, 13:50
Location: Stratford, Ontario

Re: How can I boot from USB flash, when no option in BIOS

#5 Post by rcrsn51 »

ackptui wrote:Is there a way to put a bootloader on the HDD that would immediately look to the flash to continue the boot, to get around the BIOS limitations?
Yes. Put Grub4Dos on the hard drive. Set up a menu entry that uses "pmedia=usbflash".

But what's the point? What OS will be on the flash drive? If you have a working hard drive, it's going to be far faster than the flash drive.

What happened with your wifi project?

ackptui
Posts: 11
Joined: Thu 11 Oct 2012, 18:10

Re: How can I boot from USB flash, when no option in BIOS

#6 Post by ackptui »

rcrsn51 wrote:But what's the point? What OS will be on the flash drive? If you have a working hard drive, it's going to be far faster than the flash drive.

What happened with your wifi project?
I did wind up putting a full wary5.3 installatlon on the hdd, I guess the flash drive was just for educational purposes. So far have not figured all the nuances of MBR, boot loader, partitioning and format, and the boot flag enough to get anything loaded on the flash usb. I keep getting errors from the installer that I don't have any partitions on the flash drive, it kicks me out into the partition editor where it shows me the partitions I just did.

Since I was so monumentally unsuccessful today with the flash drive, maybe I will go back to working on the Wifi again tomorrow, someone mentioned Frisbee in the other thread, and I haven't looked at that yet. The rt5370 mini-dongle was the only thing I had that would fit into the cramped real estate around the usb ports, and I was not able to raise the wlan with it after getting the driver working. Today I put in a 4x usb card in a pci slot, and with the additional space I was able to connect a bigger wifi dongle with an antenna. It had a different chip, and was recognized by the rt2870 driver, but also did not find the wlan over several scans. So that's where I am, and tomorrow is another day, albeit one with football games.

Post Reply