Hi, I would like to boot a LINUX system from an external USB Hard Drive. Motherboard (ASUS P4P800) supports boot from USB with or without floppy emulation. Is it possible to use syslinux for booting without any floppy or CD, just from the external USB drive? Regards... Bela
Bela Markus wrote:> Hi, > > I would like to boot a LINUX system from an external USB Hard Drive. > Motherboard (ASUS P4P800) supports boot from USB with or without > floppy emulation. Is it possible to use syslinux for booting without > any floppy or CD, just from the external USB drive? >No problems there, just format the usb hard drive to fat, install syslinux on it and modify syslinux.cfg to point to the kernel and initrd images. Beware there is a bug in syslinux's memdisk in that it cannot boot msdos images while the usb drive is the primary hard drive. Quinn
H. Peter Anvin
2004-Oct-21 18:14 UTC
[syslinux] Booting LINUX from external USB Hard Drive
Bela Markus wrote:> Hi, > > I would like to boot a LINUX system from an external USB Hard Drive. > Motherboard (ASUS P4P800) supports boot from USB with or without floppy > emulation. Is it possible to use syslinux for booting without any floppy > or CD, just from the external USB drive? >Yes. Just treat it as if it was a harddrive; you need a FAT partition to install syslinux on. -hpa
H. Peter Anvin wrote:> Quinn wrote: > >> >> The problem booting msdos directly from the USB drive is not so >> important > > > > > If you can't boot it directly, odds are there is no way MEMDISK is > going to work. I don't want to spend my time chasing ghosts. > > -hpa >Ok, after 3 hours debugging the syslinux boot problem from usb, i finally solved the problem. Apparently, the BIOS, MBR, and the first partition tables boot record were not agreeing on the geometry of the usb drive. The best way to solve that problem is to do all the operations (fdisk, format c:, sys c:) on the system that the usb drive is going to boot on. That way everyone agrees on the correct geometry of the usb drive. BUT, even after syslinux can boot from the usb-drive and memdisk loads the msdos images, memdisk still cannot boot from the imaged boot floppy. The same results come up - PC DOS hangs after displaying "Startings PC-DOS..." and MS-DOS just hangs period. Peter, this can't be chasing ghosts anymore. Can you at least try once to do the same as I did. Create a bootable usb drive, install syslinux on it, and then try to boot a imaged dos floppy via memdisk? Btw, I noticed that I was replying to your personal e-mail - sorry about that - it should be in the syslinux mailing list. Quinn