Since the original report on this bug thread, I had one more access to the machine and tried it again. This time I had my USB stick prepared using "the flexible way" as per the helpful doc at http://d-i.pascal.at/ ; the partition was made pure FAT16 this time, and only mounted with mount -t msdos
I had also verified that the MBR is loaded from the stick OK -- by holding the CTRL key, I get the 1FA: prompt, pressing "F" correctly spins up the floppy etc. However, it then goes on to "Boot failed" if I try to continue booting. It is the fact that the MBR goes up OK that lead me initially to suspect the remainder of what's on the stick (I figured -- once smth off the USB stick has gotten control, it should go on by itself then). BTW, the stick (M-Systems 256m) has 2 lights - orange for USB2 high-speed access and green for low-speed USB1.1 mode. It stayed green throughout. It seems to me that the default drive (install-mbr -d 0x80 <the usb device>) is not correctly re-mapped to become the 1st hard drive through the boot sequence on this machine. I had tried -d 0x81 -d 0x82 and -d 0, all in vain. However, the default setting (-d 0x80) turned out to work OK on another machine, with a different motherboard/BIOS, with the very same USB stick. I see 2 options: 1) try upgrading the BIOS to the latest on the problematic machine (I have gotten permission from the University sysadmins to try to do it) 2) try a partitionless stick - maybe that one will be working, treated by the BIOS same way as a floppy works - but this would prevent me from carrying my needed stuff in my 2nd partition (ext2) of the same stick... I'll report on this thread about the specific BIOS versions and the motherboard specs later on. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]