Arch Linux

mickael9

Member

Registered: 2008-10-11

Posts: 29

Booting from an USB stick with an old BIOS using a boot CD

Hi

I use larch to build a customized live-usb system, and I'm pretty happy with it.

The problem is that I can't boot it on some old computers, with a BIOS that :

• Doesn't support booting from USB devices

• Doesn't support accessing USB devices

This mean, that, when using a CD with GRUB, the USB stick cannot be seen by GRUB.
That issue is discussed in the Ubuntu help : https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromUSB
As you can see, I have problem #2, so my option is to use Linux USB drivers to boot from the stick.

kernel /boot/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper noprompt cdrom-detect/try-usb=true persistent

The only problem is that, this seems to be Ubuntu-specific, and I don't know how to do that in Arch Linux : do I need a custom kernel or something ?
I tried searching for "cdrom-detect" in the Linux Kernel Documentation, without success.

Thanks

Last edited by mickael9 (2010-09-29 20:08:53)

72linus

Member

From: gordonsville,va

Registered: 2009-03-14

Posts: 144

Website

Re: Booting from an USB stick with an old BIOS using a boot CD

I use Plop bootmanager to boot from usb cause my PC cant boot from usb because of BIOS
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

I actually use a older version that seems to work better than newer one
link to mine> http://multidistro.com/downloads/plpbt

grub legacy entry

title Plop
root (hdx,x)
kernel /boot/plpbt

grub2

menuentry "Plop" {
       set root='(hd0,1)'
       search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e6adb195-3201-42f0-b6d6-f175abe1912c
       linux16 /boot/plpbt
}

see if that works

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Booting from an USB stick with an old BIOS using a boot CD

You can try a different option: http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

Edit: So now you have two votes for plop :-)

Last edited by karol (2010-09-29 20:58:36)

mickael9

Member

Registered: 2008-10-11

Posts: 29

Re: Booting from an USB stick with an old BIOS using a boot CD

Okay, I will give it a try

Edit : Seems to work with QEMU, Thanks !

I'm still curious how Ubuntu manages to do this though.

Last edited by mickael9 (2010-09-29 22:12:18)