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Torxed

Member

Registered: 2013-01-10

Posts: 202

[SOLVED] CD-Rom ARCH_201412 Doesn't boot live on i386 PC (Pentium 4)

The specs of the PC probably has little to do with this problem, but for my own sake later next year when i google this I need to remember some shit :)

I've tried the dd if=arch.iso of=/dev/<usbmem> bs=4M and that rendered "isolinux.bin missing or corrupt". So that led me to trying the manual approach, checking checksums and what not.

FInally I decided that burning a ordinary CD would do me justice.. It didn't.
It doesn't even boot. Need I remind myself that this is a old peace of memory of a PC I've got in front of me? The BIOS is probably not even equipped for such awesome features as CD-Rom. Never the less, I found a PXE option well hidden beneath layers of options (someone probably thought this was advanced and experimental so they hid it well below the depths of common foke').

So I tried PXE, worked like a charm. The exact same ISO boots but I end up at:

RROR: '/dev/disk/by-label/ARCH_201412' device did not show up after 30 seconds...
   Falling back to interactive prompt
   You can try to fix the problem manually, log out when you are finished
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off

This almost made me give in, tried both just Ctrl+D to rerun the crap, didn't work. So i tried ln -s /dev/disk/by-label/ARCH_201412 /dev/archiso after checking that the ISO was loaded and also tried using the actual CD-ROM and not the initramfs "iso" that's been loaded. No success.

Solution:
Low and behold tho, I inserted the USB from the first steps, and did CTRL+D and WHAM.. Worked

Beats me, I'm happy. This is the untold story of a sob technician who will surely Google this in a year again when the grandfathers PC breaks down again and i need to recover some files in Windows before reinstalling it.