"missing operating system" on some USB boots

[shankargopal]

I have a Kingston DataTraveller II+ 1.13 USB 1GB flash drive. I'm a very happy Puppy user who uses it as my main operating system, working off a pen drive that I use on multiple computers.

I've found something a little mysterious recently. The Kingston drive I mentioned above boots fine on one machine, with an Award BIOS (as far as I know). On several other machines with Intel BIOS's (I think that's what they are - the startup screen says "Intel Desktop Board"), the BIOS appears able to find the USB drive. But when I try to boot from it it says either "Missing Operating System", or Syslinux starts and then says "Invalid or corrupt kernel image." Oddly enough the latter message also appeared on a computer that had once earlier booted the Kingston drive normally.

The setup in the Intel BIOS consists of a setting for "USB Boot Enabled" and then one has to choose the sequence of Hard Disk Drives to put the USB drive at the top. There's no option for USB-ZIP vs USB-HDD etc.

On most of the latter machines, the system boots fine from a WakePup floppy.

Any ideas? Does this mean my drive is damaged in some way?

[Ian]

It could mean that your bios will not boot a pen drive.

I have found this on some late model machines & mobos.

[shankargopal]

But what's odd about this is three things - first, that these BIOS's explicitly provide for booting off USB, second that they see the pen drive on startup, and thirdly that (I think) on at least one of them the drive worked at first but doesn't work now.

Or actually make that four things - if the BIOS can't boot the pen dirve, how is it that on some of them Syslinux actually starts up and then says "Invalid or corrupt kernel image"?

very confused )

[maxraign]

Hello,
The problem, as I have found one with my thumbdrive is almost the same. It was booting nicely from this NCP 128 (eventhogh it is written as 128, the capacity is only 122 MB) and one fine morning it destroyed all my USB drivers in the windows except that one for the USB mouse. I dont know why. Later I found that I cant add any other USB device other than the working mouse, and if I did, the whole system came to a stand still. No keyboard and no mouse. I hade to reinstall the whole OS after a full format.
One exceptional thing that I noted with USB Drives ( I had tried with three, the others being SAN DISK 128 and Imation 128) is that, they are becoming exceptionally hot. May in your case, the PC wont be able to read data and OS from the heating up thumbdrive. Or the drive wont be able to transfer teh data as fast as the system needs it. This thing in my case, was happened to my new system, and that is pretty fast and designed for graphical applications.
Now a days I am using the FLOPPY + CD + HDD combination with my external USB CD drive and i find that is the most comfortable way for experimenting.

[Sit Heel Speak]

Some USB flash keys can run from USB port power alone, some cannot (i.e. they require you to plug them into an external USB adapter with supplemental wall-outlet-brick power). Attempting to use an external-power-requiring USB flash key, unpowered, may result in the symptoms you describe.

[shankargopal]

Nope, that doesn't seem to be it either as this is an ordinary pen drive with no external power supply.

I wonder if it might be that there is only one partition - perhaps if the boot partition was less than 1024 cylinders? Anyway will ahve to try it.

[Sit Heel Speak]

Not enough clues, without knowing the exact identities of the computers and which Puppy version and what you have done to the flash drive previously (e.g. formatted it NTFS?). My 2GB SanDisk Cruzer Mini flash key boots just fine, to either Puppy 1.0.8r or Puppy 2 alpha 3, factory-formatted as a single FAT32 partition.