Desktop with USB capability refuses to boot

schivmeister · 2010-11-21 14:21:48

I have a very strange machine here. It's an old Pentium 4, but that's all I could manage to figure out ATM. I had access to it a few times and once tried to boot off of my USB Arch install. Back then I had GRUB on it, and while it boots fine on 2 compaq laptops, 1 acer netbook, and 1 lenovo desktop, it refused to do so on that machine. The BIOS had "USB Boot" enabled, and my SanDisk was detected. I moved it up in the priority list, but GRUB failed with error 15 (or 17, can't quite recall).

Today I had some work to do on it again, so I tried to boot my USB. This time, though, I had put syslinux on it. Boots fine on all other laptops and desktops I've tried (as above), but fails on this particular desktop. Aside from a quick flashy message "missing operating system", it just continued to the Windows XP it has on the primary hard disk. Now, this is a valid syslinux error, but only happens when it's not configured properly AFAICT. As you can note, I have it booting fine on other systems.

The only difference here is that there are 2 hard disks in this machine, 1 SATA and 1 IDE. Of course, I could use a boot floppy/CD, but there is a challenge I see here. Ideas welcome

TigTex · 2010-11-22 00:21:04

That's probably because your usb drive is not being recognized as an usb-hdd. Having at least 2 partitions on that usb stick usualy helps some old bios to recognize that usb device as an hdd. I would also try to search for a bios update for that particular system.
Also check if there is an option on your bios called "usb storage emulation" and set that to usb-hdd (it defaults to usb-floppy and fails with 1gb+ usb flash).
Just an idea, my p4 does the same

Last edited by TigTex (2010-11-22 00:22:46)

schivmeister · 2010-11-22 14:17:19

In fact, my USB (Flash drive) does contain 2 partitions:

1) FAT32 - storage, 24GB
2) EXT2 - Arch Linux, 7GB

The thing is, we can be sure that the bootloader is being executed, because "missing operating system" is a syslinux output (and even before when it had grub there was grub error output).

If the bootloader was executed, then the BIOS got the priority and disk right. However, the system then acts as if the bootloader was misconfigured - which is not the case at all.

Now that you mention the 1GB+ thing, I have a big hunch that might just be it. At least, it might have to do with the fact that this Flash drive is probably too big for a P4 mobo - 32GB! The bootable partition itself is 7GB. Also, there are a few USB options in the BIOS, but they all appear correct. No such item refering to any kind of emulation, though.

I'll have to get smaller drives to test this out.

TigTex · 2010-11-22 15:08:21

Maybe that would work if you had one /boot partition on the first sectors or if your partitions were in reverse order or . first archlinux and then storage because it looks that your bios doesn't know how to boot from higher capacity flash drives, but booting from the first partition should be no problem. I think... Unable to boot from a partition above xxGB is a really old bios "limitation", from the pentium mmx time...

Last edited by TigTex (2010-11-22 15:10:37)

schivmeister · 2010-11-23 12:54:22

Unfortunately, the 1st partition has to be a large FAT32 for (shared) storage. So that can't be made bootable, as Windows needs to be able to see and mount it.

Further probing into this matter reveals an old, odd and persistent issue with regards to FAT16 and/or USB-ZIP mode [1][2][3]. The USB-boot implementation in modern computers should be that of USB-HDD, which explains why my key works on rather recent machines.

I'm still trying to figure out what in the world a standalone partition "#4" is, when there is one or no pre-existing partition. If I'm correct I should end up with a "fourth" partition of a predefined size out of nowhere, and this should be /boot, FAT16 and syslinux. Then I can make a "first" partition for the FAT32, followed by a "second" containing the EXT2 Linux stuff. A "third" partition then would essentially be non-existent. This is probably because I've had very little hands-on experience with ZIP drives to actually understand the underlying design.

[1] http://www.finnix.org/Bootable_USB_flash_drives
[2] http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Bootable_USB_Key
[3] http://syslinux.zytor.com/doc/usbkey.txt

Arch Linux

#1 2010-11-21 14:21:48

Desktop with USB capability refuses to boot

#2 2010-11-22 00:21:04

Re: Desktop with USB capability refuses to boot

#3 2010-11-22 14:17:19

Re: Desktop with USB capability refuses to boot

#4 2010-11-22 15:08:21

Re: Desktop with USB capability refuses to boot

#5 2010-11-23 12:54:22

Re: Desktop with USB capability refuses to boot

Board footer