On Sun, Sep 07, 2008 at 10:10:35AM -0700, Carl Lowenstein wrote:
The difficult part is that there is not much standardization in how a BIOS boot uses a USB drive. Some treat it as a floppy, some as a CDrom, some as a hard drive, some as a Zip drive. And then there are the older BIOSes that don't boot USB flash drives at all.
SYSLINUX should boot from any of them. As long as there is a FAT filesystem available, and BIOS calls to read the data. I haven't found a machine yet that tried to boot USB that wouldn't boot it. That's only part of the problem, though. SYSLINUX will load the kernel and initrd. The next step is figuring out how to the distribution to be able to find the USB device instead of a CDROM. You could use ISOLINUX, but as you say not all BIOS's will boot from a USB drive that has a CD image on it, since some treat it as a Zip drive or a HD. I still don't understand why this tool wants to hack your bootloader? mkusb.sh (part of RIP Linux) is just a shell script. It has to be run as root to get access to the device node for the USB drive, but it otherwise just runs ordinary utilities. <http://ftp.cvut.cz/mirrors/rip/www.tux.org/pub/people/kent-robotti/looplinux/rip/> The 'mkusb.sh' script is down a ways on the page. David -- KPLUG-List@kernel-panic.org http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
