What is needed to make a USB flash drive bootable?

[hoven]

I just can't get my head around what happens between when the computer is turned on and the boot loader does/doesn't start up.

What I want to do is connect a USB flash drive to my computer and have it boot from it. I can do this from an external USB Hard Disk Drive but I fail with a flash drive. Is it me or is it the computer?

My laptop does not have an inbuilt floppy drive and I do not want to boot up with a floppy, cd or internal hard drive and then transfer control to the flash drive. Most searches here refer to that as booting from a USB drive but I think that is wrong and confusing unless I am even thicker than I first thought.

So what do I need to do apart from format a USB flash drive and set the boot flag on it?

I have tried the Puppy Universal installer. I have tried doing something like:

Code: Select all

# dd if=mbrfat.bin of=/dev/sda
# mkdosfs /dev/sda1
# syslinux /dev/sda1

I have tried spb2_mbr.bin and sys-nopart.mbr also but I really don't know what I am doing or why.

I have also tried installing Grub and Grub4dos.

This is the result of the disktype command:

Code: Select all

--- /dev/sda
Block device, size 3.770 GiB (4047503360 bytes)
GRUB boot loader, compat version 3.2, boot drive 0xff
DOS/MBR partition map
Partition 1: 3.766 GiB (4043309056 bytes, 7897088 sectors from 8192, bootable)
  Type 0x0B (FAT32 (CHS))
  FAT32 file system (hints score 4 of 5)
    Volume size 3.758 GiB (4035407872 bytes, 985207 clusters of 4 KiB)

I have also read about Plop boot manager
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#features
but I can't figure out how to install it and I am confused about whether it actually means boot from USB or not.

Please help explain this to me before the rest of my hair falls out.

[omskates]

Just a little more info from you please: Have you found which key triggers entry into your system Bios during power up? Usually esc or one of the F keys, google your machine + "how enter bios" if U can't find it. You will need to choose boot from USB in your system Bios. Had you already tried this, I could assume you have since you had success with external USB HDD.

[hoven]

Had you already tried this, I could assume you have since you had success with external USB HDD.

Yes, the way this bios works is if you have allowed a particular boot source then on boot it shows a menu with all the available boot sources in the order chosen by the bios settings.

If I have a USB Hard Disk plugged in it will say that a well as CD and internal hard disk. If I have only the flash drives I tried plugged in then only the CD and internal hard drive are offered.

Either I have not made the flash drives properly to be bootable or the bios sees USB hard disk drive and USB flash drive as different.

[rjbrewer]

Had you already tried this, I could assume you have since you had success with external USB HDD.

Yes, the way this bios works is if you have allowed a particular boot source then on boot it shows a menu with all the available boot sources in the order chosen by the bios settings.

If I have a USB Hard Disk plugged in it will say that a well as CD and internal hard disk. If I have only the flash drives I tried plugged in then only the CD and internal hard drive are offered.

Either I have not made the flash drives properly to be bootable or the bios sees USB hard disk drive and USB flash drive as different.

What is the make and model of this machine? Which Puppy do you have installed?

[hoven]

It's a Compaq Evo N610c. I have seen internet references to people successfully booting from USB flash with this laptop but in the cases I found the USB flash drives were created with the HP USB Flash utility while used on Microsoft Windows.

Puppy I am using at the moment is based on 4.0 but I have others. I doubt that has anything to do with it as I tried the current Grub4dos.

[Wateroo]

If you are using Grub4dos, will you post the text of your "menu.lst" and list your files in puppy directory here ? Then I'll give you some suggestions.

[hoven]

If you are using Grub4dos, will you post the text of your "menu.lst" and list your files in puppy directory here ? Then I'll give you some suggestions.

Thanks for the offer but my problem is well before that. I can't get the flash drives to be recognised as bootable.

[rhadon]

Hi hoven,

I've a similar problem with my Gericom. No matter which usb stick is plugged in (I know they are bootable on other machines) the bios boot menu doesn't show them.

There is one exception: if I install Puppy in Superfloppy mode with Puppy Universal Installer to the stick. Then the stick will be detected by the bios boot menu and I'm able to boot from it.

I'm not sure this will also work for you but you have nothing to loose if you try.

HTH

Rolf

[rcrsn51]

USB bootability has always been a bit of a black art. Do you have a second machine you can test your flash drive on? Have you tried more than one drive?

I would format the drive using Gparted and double-check that the boot flag is set. I might even start by creating a new disk label, which deletes the old partitions.

I always use mbr.bin as the file of boot code that gets written onto the drive's MBR.

[hoven]

Have you tried more than one drive?

I might even start by creating a new disk label, which deletes the old partitions.

Yes I tried three drives of different brands. I'll try your suggestion of the new disk label and Rhadon's suggestion of Superfloppy.

Thanks for the suggestions, so basically you are saying that I didn't leave anything necessary out and if my next round of tries doesn't work then all I can do is try other drive brands.

[rcrsn51]

The next thing I would try is a different computer.

[tikbalang]

ignore the HP format tool. it does not work.

since you are wtill using windows,

1. format the usb disk with regular windows or puppy formatter (gparted).
2. get bootice by pauly and use that to install your preferred bootmanager.
3. copy puppy files from iso to the usb.
4. configure your bootmanager.

[hoven]

The next thing I would try is a different computer.

Unfortunately that's not an option at the present time and doesn't solve what I was trying to do, which was have backup boot devices for this computer.

One more question, the USB Hard Disk Drives that do boot from the laptop were both formatted and made bootable from within Windows. Windows is no longer accessible on this laptop but is it possible that something to do with Windows is required?

[hoven]

since you are wtill using windows,

I'm sorry if I gave that impression but I do not have access to Windows apart from the XP recovery console.

[nooby]

Can it have to do with settle time of the device. USB Flash takes a certain time to settle.

So Barry added some delay to make it have time to settle. Cheap USB flash maybe are slower than the time Barry settled for it?

Not sure if the following experience is related. My HDD which is a regular mechanic HDD 250GB failed to boot some ten times in a row.

Extremely annoying. So in desperation me added nosmp because I have an Atom processor. I also added this to the kernel line.

pmedia=ataflash

yes it is a redirect way to add time to the boot thing. Surprisingly after that it always boot. Without it it goes into kernel panic. Very odd.

Th3 better way would be to add delay but I have no clue on how to.