Re: GRUB Problem: Can't Boot off my USB Disk

Noelle wrote:


Reinstalling the O/S, which included doing the partitioning steps all
over again,
but this time specifying MBR of the USB disk on which to install GRUB
stage1,
worked. Now the initrd ramdisk is causing a panic... probably because
it does
not have USB drivers by default, so I will open it up and add them.

Recap:
The reason modifying things to install GRUB (stage1) onto the MBR
without
reinstalling the O/S did not work is because the new MBR GRUB would
look onto
the very beginning of the USB disk for a /boot filesystem, which was
not there.
What was there? the stage1 GRUB image I had told the Fedora installer
(the
first time I did the installation) to place there (i.e. the first
sector of /boot), as well
as what must have appeared to MBR GRUB as a corrupted /boot since it
was not
expecting to find both stage1 grub and a /boot filesystem.

That's where it was getting the messed up "menu.lst" from. Basically
the boundary
were the /boot filesystem should have started for MBR GRUB to find it,
was not where
it was expected to be simply because what I specified on the first go
around of
the installation of FC5 (which was to install at that location
"stage1").

Thank you for pointing me in the right direction!

Best Regards,
Noel


I've never managed to get grub booting off the USB.
It will be interesting to hear if you achieve it.

I have however managed to get the 700Mb knoppix CD
image booting from a 2Gb USB stick.
I first let DSL linux install its booter into a small
partition of its own. It uses Sys Linux as the booter
and FAT16 (note!) on its part to make things work.
The remaining space I divided into 2 more FAT16 partitions.
One partition just big enough + 10% for the knoppix
image taken from the knoppix livecd. The remaining
partition is for all the data that I was going to carry
on the drive.
Then I teased the boot menu files in the first partition
to give DSL boot and knoppix boot options.

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Booting process
    ... image to the usb. ... Are you overwriting the MBR??? ... 1) partition it marm a partition as bootable ...   2) put an MBR ...
    (comp.lang.asm.x86)
  • Re: installating from iso
    ... But I could maybe mount the full DVD .iso using the USB stick ... version, after mounting the Vista partition which contains that ISO, ... then why not install from that? ... Put the OS ISO image on a FAT32 partition. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Preparing a USB key for installation
    ... This concerns installation of Fedora based distros from a USB key. ... However the partition table that this command creates is rather unusable for any thing other than installations. ... It is necessary to know a bit about ZIP drives. ... There is a current bug in anaconda that seems to cause grub to be installed into the MBR of the USB drive when you install this way, and if the USB drive during install is read by the BIOS as a disk drive. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: Preparing a USB key for installation
    ... Note that when installing a Fedora-based distro one has to change the disk order as anaconda want's to install grub on /dev/sda, the USB key. ... However the partition table that this command creates is rather unusable for any thing other than installations. ...
    (Fedora)
  • Re: GRUB question
    ... on the boot partition. ... Grub is normally installed in the hard drive MBR,, ... In a traditional Microsoft install, ...
    (Ubuntu)