Syslinux - Feb 2011 - Booting a USB drive

I have a 40GB IDE laptop hard drive I took out of a dead laptop and I
was hoping to put some good use to it.

The drive is inside a USB drive enclosure and I carry it in my laptop bag.

Its not big enough to be a backup drive, and generally too big to BIOS
boot from.

The chipset on the enclosure is from Prolific and registers as a "Mass
Storage Device"

I haven't had good luck with prolific based products in the past as I
have a USB->serial converter with a prolific chipset that does not
work worth beans.

What I was hoping to do with the drive was partition it with small
enough partitions that one of them could boot from BIOS.

I wanted to have a boot section that contained the boot images for my
favorite linux network based installers, and a live image for
troubleshooting physical equipment.

Then in one of the other partitions I'd have my post install scripts
that I run, and in another partition I'd leave myself room for client
specific configuration notes and such.

As it turns out, booting a USB device is hard, as HPA has written
about several times.  BIOS bugs from major BIOS makers like AWARD that
don't seem to ever get fixed are just some of the problem.

I'm starting to think that this is a waste of time.

I looked at grub for this, but I happen to despise GRUB2 for its AUTO
configuration.  I much prefer Grub legacy with a config file to edit.

syslinux seemed like a decent alternative and I figured I could use
most of the same syslinux configuration for my in house pxelinux
configuration.

But I have been reading alot on how to do this and I keep finding
reasons to be wary.

Am I wasting my time?  Should I just use a basic key without the
prolific chip?  What is the best way to proceed?

On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 15:51, Rance Hall <ranceh at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I have a 40GB IDE laptop hard drive I took out of a dead laptop and I
> was hoping to put some good use to it.
>
> The drive is inside a USB drive enclosure and I carry it in my laptop bag.
> syslinux seemed like a decent alternative and I figured I could use
> most of the same syslinux configuration for my in house pxelinux
> configuration.
I do the same but I use SYSLINUX, ISOLINUX and PXELINUX.  I've been
able to construct everything to be portable to all of these variants.
> But I have been reading alot on how to do this and I keep finding
> reasons to be wary.
>
> Am I wasting my time? ?Should I just use a basic key without the
> prolific chip? ?What is the best way to proceed?
Personally, I've had zero experience with these chipsets however there
are some generic tests that you can do to test the viability of this
system.

* With USB Boot enabled, boot from a CD or PXE.  Sometimes (but not
always) the BIOS will present the USB HDD as a drive.  HDT
(com32/hdt/hdt.c32) provides a great way to see available hard drives
and their reported geometry.  Most of the time, a drive that size will
have a H/S geometry of 255/63.  I've had better luck with seeing the
USB drive from non-USB boot when multiple USB drives are present.

* Copy in an MBR ('d recommend mbr/mbr.bin from Syslinux), create a
small FAT partition aligned on cylinders of H/S 255/63, install
SYSLINUX and copy in HDT.  Run HDT and see what it says for geometry.

Your best bet for creating something usable (with regards to
compatibility with broken BIOSs) is to probably have a boot partition
at CHS 0,1,1 (the first normally usable sector) and use a H/S drive
geometry of 255/63 or copy the ZIP100/ZIP250 geometry (H/S 32/64) and
keep the end of the partition below cylinder 1023.  Some BIOSs are
(unfortunately) only capable of USB-ZIP mode booting.

-- 
-Gene