Arch Linux

myrlin

Member

Registered: 2010-06-11

Posts: 300

Bootable USB - Advice Needed

I have reecently been given an old custom-built PC, based on an Asrock K7S41GX motherboard, running an AMD Sempron 2600 processor.

It's in good condition, so I thought I'd give it another lease of life by installing Arch.

The problem is that it won't boot any of my live-distro USB sticks (Parted Magic and the latest Arch). These wre all created using the "dd" method, and all work perfectly on other (Intel-based) machines.

I've had limited success with booting from a 1GB USB stick, but only when I format it to FAT16 under Windows, using the HP Set-Up Tool, then switching to Arch and installing Parted Magic using Unetbootin.

As far as I can determine, the machine will only boot from something it recognises as an MS-DOS recovery disk.

I have examined all the BIOS settings, but have not found anything useful.

Is it me (probably), the mobo, the processor, or something completely different?

I would be very grateful if anyone could throw any light on this problem.

wombat23

Member

Registered: 2011-01-14

Posts: 46

Re: Bootable USB - Advice Needed

Some mainboards (older ones in particular) don't support booting from USB. I could not get my Macbook (2006 model) to boot a USB stick either.

Did you look at the mainboard manual?

FrozenFox

Member

From: College Station, TX

Registered: 2008-03-23

Posts: 422

Website

Re: Bootable USB - Advice Needed

You might try loading from http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html  PLoP boot manager. I had some success booting from USB on a machine that was incapable of booting from usb on its own, using a floppy disk with PLoP BL on it. I had to make sure to spam E or whatever button it was (to edit the distro's GRUB configuration) when it was loading the usb though, because my particular laptop wouldn't run without a bunch of kernel flags tacked on (the typical -noapic -nolapic -acpi=off stuff), it would just hang very early on loading the usb or act like it wasnt reading at all such that i thought the usb wasn't working even though it was.

A combination of the above may or may not help.. worth a shot.

Last edited by FrozenFox (2012-07-25 16:38:32)

MoonSwan

Member

From: Great White North

Registered: 2008-01-23

Posts: 881

Re: Bootable USB - Advice Needed

Update the systems BIOS  with a new one from the vendor's website.  That is usually the one thing I have to do to get older machines to boot up.  It doesn't always work mind you, but it has solved a lot of headaches on  my machines when I wanted to boot up a simple USB or CD-ROM disc.

Last edited by MoonSwan (2012-07-25 16:49:27)

myrlin

Member

Registered: 2010-06-11

Posts: 300

Re: Bootable USB - Advice Needed

Thanks, everyone, for your quick replies.

The mobo manual states that it does support booting from USB, and I have had success in booting from a USB formatted as described in my post. It just won't talk Linux!

I have updated the BIOS to the latest revision.

I will investigte  PLoP to see if that helps.