Debian USB Install: "No Boot Sector on USB Device" on laptop
Greetings,
I'm fairly competent with Slackware, but am a newbie with Debian. I want to be able to work with Debian on my laptop. This machine is an old Dell Inspiron, with Win 7 installed on the main, internal drive. My intention was to install Debian and the bootloader on a usb drive, so it wouldn't interfere with my rickety, old Windows install. I'm using a WD My Passport Ultra (1 TB). I installed Debian "wheezy" on the usb drive and everything went well. I created a number of partitions and put GRUB2 (v. 1.99) on the first one (sdb1). Every time I boot to the usb drive, I get an the error message, "No Boot Sector on USB Device." I've selected the usb drive manually and placed it 1st in the BIOS boot sequence. I get the same message, either way. I used Super Grub2 Disk 2 and it shows the grub install on my usb drive. I can boot the Debian installation off of SG2D2 and it works fine. Here is some select info from SG2D2: Code:
Windows Vista (hd1, msdos1) Code:
Boot Info Script 0.61 [1 April 2012] This would be fine normally, but I want a portable Debian workstation. I have a much older version of Fedora on a WD usb drive and it boots fine off the laptop. I'm thinking the BIOS on my laptop is too old to boot a usb2/usb3 drive. The most recent update was in 2009. I'm sure I'm missing something here, which is why I'm posting to LQ. Any suggestion would be a great help. Thanks... |
I have plenty of ideas but maybe just as easy to start all over.
Since you say it did work on a different system makes me wonder what made it work versus what prevented it from working. Best idea I have is /boot put too high on drive. Doubt this has anything to do with pae. Just to test. Make a virtual machine without a hard drive. Boot to debian installer and install to a 8G flash drive maybe. This way the install is isolated from any host. It should create a drive that can be used on this system. Other ideas may be that you have to go to bios and see the usb drive. Still can't explain the odd install and grub location. Why did you put it on sdx1? |
I'm inclined to agree with you on starting over.
When I went to bios setup on my desktop, it had recognized its name and version. The bios on my laptop just says, in effect, "plain old usb." But then, the desktop is a much newer machine. The laptop bios does recognize it as a unique drive. This is the 2nd install. I installed on /dev/sdb the first time and got the same result. This is where my impatience and ignorance come into play. I thought installing on sdb1 would be the best place to install grub. This is a 1 TB drive. I wonder if this makes a difference. It took FOREVER to format the drive. |
Have you checked in bios to see if it's listed under hdd's? Passports have software at the beginning of the drive so trying the usb option maybe trying to boot from it. Try hdd's, because most usb drives that are bootable appear there althouh may be listed in usb or cd devices.
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I did check the bios, before boot and the usb drive was not listed. It was only the internal drive and the cd/dvd drive.
I installed Debian on my older, smaller WD usb drive and it boots and works just fine. Go figure. |
"I installed Debian on my older, smaller WD usb drive and it boots and works just fine." This makes me think that size of drive is issue.
Locations important data too high on the drive. Once linux is running this shouldn't matter. I'd assume this is all usb2 isn't it? |
According to the WD site, with this drive, you get, "compatibility with the latest USB 3.0 devices and backward compatibility with USB 2.0 devices as well."
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Last night, I figured the boot failure problem was due to the fact the WD usb is more or less a usb 3 drive. I did a search for Debian, usb 3.0 and failure to boot and I found the following page:
How to install Ubuntu Server on a USB 3.0 stick and boot that stick This seemed close enough to my issue. I ignored the "installation" section. I loaded Debian via my Super Grub2 Disk 2 dvd and made the prescribed changes in the 2nd section (with the exception of plugging the drive into a usb 3 port, since my laptop doesn't have one). I rebooted and had no luck. I wasn't surprised. I got up this morning and turned on my laptop and was indeed surprised, this time around. I'd left my usb drive plugged in and GRUB loaded properly and launched Debian. I wanted to make sure it wasn't a fluke and rebooted. Again, I got the no boot sector error. So I shutdown completely and started the machine fresh. GRUB/Debian loaded properly. It seems Debian boots only after a fresh start-up. I'm not sure why this is. And I'm not sure the changes I made to the install, last night, had an effect, but this setup will work. |
On a hard shutdown/boot you get a full hardware review when you boot.
On a soft shutdown/reboot you get most of the check but a full check is not run because in most cases this would be a waste of time as you are rebooting an internal hdd. You are booting a drive over 2gigs and this can cause some real problems for your bios which were not really designed for that sort of thing at all. Not sure why it happens at 2 gigs but that seems to be the cutoff. Your OS and grub are obviously not having any problem with it as long as they have the complete hardware check. If you repartition ever I would recommend using cfdisk (or fdisk) as this gives a lot cleaner job, cfdisk will probably not open your drive becuase of overlapping partitions right now. Split the thing in half making 2 large partitions. Make the second one extended. Make the first partition in sda fill the whole of sda as an extended partition too. Then the drive will appear to bios as 2, 2gig devices and make it happier. Will also be much faster to format. |
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