[SOLVED] Boot CD or Floppy with USB Drivers for Booting Old Hardware

joelmay · 01-28-2012, 03:23 PM

Hello all,

I have an old laptop that does not support USB booting, but I want to do it. I was able to install Debian to the flash drive, but booting from it is my current task. I have tried Plop Boot Manager, but with Grub it would just freeze, and with Lilo it is mounted as read only and causes problems that dump me into busybox. I see that very old versions of Debian have a boot floppy, but that has not worked for me.

From my Ubuntu box I have used grub-mkrecovery along with a few other tools to make a CD with the Ubuntu initrd and vmlinuz. When I booted the CD I was presented with a Grub prompt and I loaded the kernel and initrd then booted. I saw the USB drivers being loaded as the Ubuntu kernel was booting, but it gave me a initramfs shell, but I do not know how to load the OS from the flash drive at this point.

To make the boot CD I edited /etc/initramfs-tools/modules to include usbcore, sd_mod, ehci_hcd, uhci_hcd, ohci_hcd, usb_storage, and scsi_mod. Then I did the mkinitramfs (using the Ubuntu kernel version instead of the Debian one). I added boot/grub/menu.lst, but Grub seemed to ignore it, but that's fine for now, I just want to get it working before I care if the whole process is automated.

After booting the CD I typed something like:

Code:

legacy_kernel /boot/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed
legacy_initrd /boot/initrd.gz
boot

Right now I seem to just need to know how to boot from the flash drive from initramfs. If I run into any problems because I'm using the Ubuntu kernel then I'm going to switch to the Debian kernel, but I don't want to waste my time doing that to hit the same roadblock without any help.

The computer does have a hard drive, but in the end I want to run without it because I've already killed one laptop hard drive from constant use over about a year. It does have a CD-ROM drive (for some reason the computer has problems booting ISOLINUX on the Debian install CD so I did the install in Windows as an alternative). It does have a floppy drive. The BIOS is too old and has no update to boot from USB. The only USB port is a 1.1.

rkelsen · 01-28-2012, 04:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by joelmay

I have an old laptop that does not support USB booting, but I want to do it.

Impossible, unless you hack the BIOS of the laptop.

You can do whatever you want with a USB stick but if the BIOS doesn't look for it, then the computer will never boot that way.

You will have to boot from CD and set the root partition to the USB flash drive.

At the lilo prompt, type the following:

boot: your_kernel_filename root=/dev/sdb1 rdinit= ro

This assumes that your USB device is detected as /dev/sdb1. Substitute whichever device there.

If it continues to fail, you might need to try an older distro.

joelmay · 01-28-2012, 04:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkelsen

Impossible, unless you hack the BIOS of the laptop.

You can do whatever you want with a USB stick but if the BIOS doesn't look for it, then the computer will never boot that way.

Sorry, I wasn't clear about what I meant. I want to boot from the USB flash drive with the aid of a CD/floppy (or even PXE).

Quote:

Originally Posted by rkelsen

You will have to boot from CD and set the root partition to the USB flash drive.

At the lilo prompt, type the following:

boot: your_kernel_filename root=/dev/sdb1 rdinit= ro

This assumes that your USB device is detected as /dev/sdb1. Substitute whichever device there.

If it continues to fail, you might need to try an older distro.

What CD image do I need to boot from? The one I currently have has Grub and the Ubuntu kernel, not lilo. I did have lilo installed to the MBR of the flash drive and used Plop to boot from it, but due to the drive being mounted as read only that method won't work.

How do I get the kernel module for the USB driver loaded to lilo?

Thank you for your help and please be patient with me; I have a lot to learn.

rkelsen · 01-28-2012, 05:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by joelmay

Sorry, I wasn't clear about what I meant. I want to boot from the USB flash drive with the aid of a CD/floppy (or even PXE).

What CD image do I need to boot from? The one I currently have has Grub and the Ubuntu kernel, not lilo. I did have lilo installed to the MBR of the flash drive and used Plop to boot from it, but due to the drive being mounted as read only that method won't work.

How do I get the kernel module for the USB driver loaded to lilo?

USB support will be in your kernel. Essentially, you need a kernel and initrd to boot from, then you can do as you please.

But it doesn't have to be that difficult. An alternative solution to this problem would be something like Knoppix. It won't be lightning quick, but it will work with a minimum of fuss. You might want to download an older version if the newer ones struggle with your hardware.

rokytnji · 01-28-2012, 08:14 PM

.

Quote:

I have tried Plop Boot Manager

I am running AntiX 11 installed from USB made with Unetbootin and I used a PLOP Floppy Disk (I did not install PLOP to MBR, But used the floppy to control USB boot)

This is a IBM A22M Laptop with a Floppy Drive and DVDROM with USB 1.1 (1 Port) with a external PCMCIA 2 port USB combo Firewire Cardbus (Cheapo Chinese made). Bios has no USB boot support either.

Code:

System:    Host: Biker Kernel: 3.2.2-antix.1-486-smp i686 (32 bit) 
           Desktop: IceWM 1.3.7 Distro: antiX-M11-686 Jayaben Desai 01 May 2011
Machine:   Mobo: IBM model: 2628TWU Bios: IBM version: KXET33WW (1.06 ) date: 09/05/2001
CPU:       Single core Pentium III (Coppermine) (-UP-) cache: 256 KB flags: (sse) clocked at 1000.00 MHz 
Graphics:  Card: ATI Rage Mobility P/M AGP 2x 
           X.Org: 1.11.2.902 drivers: ati,mach64 (unloaded: fbdev,vesa) Resolution: 1024x768@87.0hz 
           GLX Renderer: Rasterizer GLX Version: 2.1 Mesa 7.11.2
Audio:     Card: Cirrus Logic CS 4614/22/24/30 [CrystalClear SoundFusion Audio Accelerator] driver: snd_cs46xx
           Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: 1.0.24
Network:   Card-1: 3Com 3c556B CardBus [Tornado] driver: 3c59x 
           IF: eth0 state: down mac: <filter>
           Card-2: Ralink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI driver: rt61pci 
           IF: wlan0 state: up mac: <filter>
Drives:    HDD Total Size: 20.0GB (34.8% used) 1: /dev/sda IC25N020ATCS04 20.0GB 
Partition: ID: / size: 6.4G used: 3.4G (56%) fs: ext4 ID: /home size: 12G used: 3.2G (29%) fs: ext4 
           ID: swap-1 size: 0.76GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 40.0C mobo: 40.0C 
           Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: 0 
Info:      Processes: 103 Uptime: 56 min Memory: 272.6/501.9MB Client: Shell inxi: 1.7.28

As far as being impossible.

Quote:

Impossible, unless you hack the BIOS of the laptop.

http://antix.freeforums.org/post20484.html#p20484

I guess it depends on the kernel more than anything else on whether you will get a successful boot with PLOP.

rkelsen · 01-29-2012, 01:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rokytnji

As far as being impossible.

To clarify what I meant: You can't boot from USB unassisted (i.e. without the aid of a floppy or CD-ROM) if the BIOS doesn't support it.

joelmay · 01-30-2012, 01:49 AM

Thank you all for your help. It is much appreciated. I found the solution to the problem. I tried booting the flash drive on a modern computer that does recognize the flash drive and got the exact same problem as I was getting with Plop. I realized that I was getting the initramfs prompt before the messages saying the flash drive was ready, thus a delay is needed. Lilo works and GRUB doesn't on the flash drive with Plop on my laptop. The way to get the delay is to add this to /etc/lilo.conf

Code:

append="rootdelay=10"

I was wrong to think the Plop USB driver being read-only would be a problem. I found that it's read only while loading the kernel and initrd, but as soon as Linux loads the driver I gain write access.