Hi,

Several weeks ago I put up a post looking for advice on how to boot RH Linux 9 from a flashdrive. The reason was that I could neither get LILO nor GRUB to work as bootloaders in a system that already had WIN 98SE and Win XP installed and during several RH 9 installation attempts I kept getting the same warning that I will need a boot diskette. I do not really like using diskettes and I wanted a faster boot but I was quite disappointed with the responses I got; they were very few and there wasn't a single useful one!

However, after reading a description in the book "RH Linux 7 Unleashed" of how one can boot Linux from a DOS command line I figured out a simple way by myself. I reckoned that if you can do that, why not put DOS on the flashdrive and use loadlin.exe from there? I formatted my flashdrive with a Win98 utility that came with it as a USB-ZIP drive (for some strange reason I could not format it as USB-HDD, which I think it really is) and then copied vmlinuz from my RH 9 boot diskette to it. Loadlin.exe was in the /dosutils directory of my RH 9 installation CD and I copied that, too.

Next I wrote an autoexec.bat with just one line:

loadlin vmlinuz root=/dev/hdb3 ro

Substitute hdb3 with whatever your root partition is. I then set my BIOS to USB-ZIP as the 1st and HDD-0 as the 2nd boot device; but if your BIOS does not support these choices you're out of luck.

Now I simply stick the stick in when I want to boot Linux and of course it's much faster than with the diskette. And if I don't, I get my usual Win XP loader giving me a choice between XP Professional and 98SE, which loads from the MBR on C:\.

Since the solution is so simple I really wonder (being a newbie) why none of the "gurus" told me about it!

Regards
George

Because most people would just fix the problem and install the bootloader on the MBR as it is supposed to, instead of spending all their time trying to figure out how to waste a USB FlashDrive.

I do not see the need for such an arrogant reply but MS3FGX’s message is unfortunately typical for some of you “experienced” guys. Some of you seem to have forgotten that once there was a time when you also started out with zero knowledge about Linux, so how come you are now making it a habit to ridicule newbies?

Incidentally, I already did try to fix the bootloader problem as Mr. Smartass has suggested and ended up having to re-install all 3 OS’s! Thereafter I also tried a 3rd party bootloader (OSL 2000) and even that could not pick up RH 9. So much for spending all my time trying to figure out how to “waste” a USB FlashDrive. The boot files take up only 1.5 MB and I still have over 126 MB for data storage, I think that’s hardly a waste.

In any case, after the previous disaster I’m now happy that my solution works without having to mess with the MBR again.

George