Hi, I bought a USB hard drive, got Mandriva installed on it, and made it bootable with extlinux. Works great on machines that can boot from USB. I also created a boot cd using the instructions in the wiki. This is working too. The only problem with the boot cd is that I had to copy the kernel, initrd, etc. to the cd. This means that whenever I install a new kernel I'll have to create and burn a new cd image. Not so burdensome I can't live with it if there's no better way. But I'm wondering if there is a way to get the cd to tell the computer to boot using the kernel on the usb drive. Is such a thing possible? On a related note, it doesn't seem that isolinux can use the boot menu like extlinux. At least I couldn't get it to work. Is this a limitation on booting from cd or was I just doing something wrong again? I started by copying over my working extlinux.conf to isolinux.cfg, along with the vesamenu.c32 file that it references, but it seemed to ignore it. Thanks, Shocky -- These are my opinions. Get your own.
> But I'm wondering if there is a way to get the cd to tell the computer to boot > using the kernel on the usb drive. Is such a thing possible?You can use PloP. Features: * CD/DVD boot without BIOS support * USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI) * Floppy boot * Different profiles for operating systems * Define up to 16 partitions * No extra partition for the boot manager * Hidden boot, maybe you have a rescue system installed and the user should not see that there is another system installed * Boot countdown * Hide partitions * Password protection for the computer and the boot manager setup * Backup of partition table data * Textmode user interface 80x50 * Graphic user interface 640x480, 800x600, 1024x786, 1280x1024 * MBR partition table edit * Start of the boot manager from harddisk, floppy, USB, CD, DVD * Starting from Windows boot menu * Starting from LILO, GRUB, Syslinux, Isolinux, Pxelinux (network) * The boot manager is freeware It is able to boot your USB hard drive, without BIOS support for USB booting. If you just want to run Plop without installing it in the MBR, you can make a bootable CD by burning plpbt.iso. If you want to add other files to the CD you can use the following in your isolinux.cfg: =================default plp prompt 0 label plp linux plpbt.bin ================= Plop bootmanager homepage: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html Link to the last test version (Plop v5.0.3 hangs on my PC): http://www.plop.at/en/bootmngrusblog.html Greetings, Gert Hulselmans
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 12:33:46PM -0600, Shocky wrote:> Hi, > > I bought a USB hard drive, got Mandriva installed on it, and made it bootable > with extlinux. Works great on machines that can boot from USB. I also created > a boot cd using the instructions in the wiki. This is working too. > > The only problem with the boot cd is that I had to copy the kernel, initrd, > etc. to the cd. This means that whenever I install a new kernel I'll have to > create and burn a new cd image. Not so burdensome I can't live with it if > there's no better way. > > But I'm wondering if there is a way to get the cd to tell the computer to boot > using the kernel on the usb drive. Is such a thing possible?Yes, if the kernel on the CD supports kexec. But then, you'll have to make a costumized initrd that, after finding the root device, executes the kernel and initrd there, with options extracted from extlinux.conf. If the kernel doesn't include kexec support, you could always compile a bare one with it, usb and ext3 support, and not much else.> On a related note, it doesn't seem that isolinux can use the boot menu like > extlinux. At least I couldn't get it to work. Is this a limitation on booting > from cd or was I just doing something wrong again? I started by copying over > my working extlinux.conf to isolinux.cfg, along with the vesamenu.c32 file > that it references, but it seemed to ignore it.Make sure you're using isolinux.bin from the same sources as vesamenu.c32. -- lfr 0/0 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 197 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://www.zytor.com/pipermail/syslinux/attachments/20090930/32fd4816/attachment.sig>