Syslinux - Oct 2004 - Booting LINUX from external USB Hard Drive

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

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