Arch Linux

ixar

Member

Registered: 2009-06-04

Posts: 25

Tutorial: Installing Arch on a netbook when usb method fails

Hello !

I've been using Arch for sometime now, but it is the first time I post here

I recently bought an Acer Aspire One 751 netbook, and discovered that the installation method using the USB Key does not work on it due to a grub issue leading to error 17 (related to BIOS v3024 behavior on the netbook). In fact grub is not able to identify the drive it should load its file from and mixes the internal hard drive with the usb key.

For your information this netbook is sold with windows preinstalled, and it does not have a CD/DVD drive, so your best chance is a usb key.
The following procedure has been tested on windows, but may be transposed to linux as well using linux counterparts of the tools.

After a few trials, I found a workaround:
1- Download the Arch ISO image (not the usb image)
2- Download syslinux.exe from http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/Download
3- If needed format your usb key using FAT32 filesystem (only one partition for the whole key is enough)
4- Run "syslinux.exe f:" where f: is the drive representing your usb key
5- Extract the content of the ISO to the root of your usb key (I used 7-zip)
6- copy the contents of "f:\boot\isolinux" to "f:\"
7- rename "isolinux.cfg" to "syslinux.cfg"
And that's it !

Basically you just have a live CD on your usb key.
The trick was to be able to replace the grub boot loader by a boot loader able to boot on this netbook to avoid grub error 17.
It seems a lot of other hardware are impacted by grub error 17, so I suspect this may help others

Enjoy !

Last edited by ixar (2009-06-04 07:58:08)

masterkoppa

Member

Registered: 2009-04-14

Posts: 92

Re: Tutorial: Installing Arch on a netbook when usb method fails

Nice work but I think this should be posted on the wiki instead of the forums as it will eventually die out in the forums while in the wiki it can be updated by anyone and it will probably stay there the longest.

JK3mp

Member

Registered: 2009-03-25

Posts: 105

Re: Tutorial: Installing Arch on a netbook when usb method fails

Nice work but I think this should be posted on the wiki instead of the forums as it will eventually die out in the forums while in the wiki it can be updated by anyone and it will probably stay there the longest.

+1 but thanks for the info, i have a netbook i've been trying to install on and i'll give this a try.

oniony

Member

Registered: 2009-06-30

Posts: 3

Re: Tutorial: Installing Arch on a netbook when usb method fails

Awesome work.  I had been struggling for the last two days to get Arch installed to no avail.  This did the trick.