I've been trying to get Feather Linux to boot off of a Sandisk Cruzer Micro. My laptop (IBM ThinkPad X40) BIOS sees the USB device as a USB hard drive and looks like it's trying to boot, but just hangs with a blank screen. I've tried formatting it as a FAT and FAT32 device with no luck. Anyone have any ideas?

Have you tried using a USB boot floppy? (ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/featherlinux/bootusb.img)
Also, how exactly did you place Feather on your USB stick?

I didn't try the USB boot floppy because I don't have a floppy disk.

First, I tried the following under windows
Format as FAT, syslinux.exe e:, unzip files to the USB stick
Format as FAT32, syslinux.exe e:, unzip files to the USB stick

Then, I tried the following under linux:
mkfs /dev/sda1, syslinux /dev/sda1, mounted the USB stick and unzipped files to it
I also tried mkfs -F 32, and still no luck.

Each time, the system would hang as if it were thinking about booting from the USB stick because it can detect it (shows up in the BIOS), but never starts the boot loader.

I also just tried updating to the latest BIOS from IBM for this laptop.

You may well need to place an MBR on the USB stick. You can use the Debian MBR package to do that (if you use Debian already), or the dd command if you hadn't (Googling should suffice for this).

I'm assuming you mean dd the floppy boot img onto the usb stick?

No, I mean try to use the MBR package - it makes your USB stick bootable properly. dd'ing the floppy image would place you in the same boat as before I'm afraid, as you need to especially run some utilities on the USB stick.

Did you try: syslinux /dev/sda1
http://featherlinux.berlios.de/usb-instructions.htm

yes, makuyl, that was in the original post.

If you only format the whole /dev/sda (not ./dev/sda1), you won't need a bootloader if you do syslinux on /dev/sda; otherwise you do, like put GRUB stage1&2 on /dev/sda1 on /boot/grub and install grub on /dev/sda, or whatever bootloader you like. This is the meaning I think of comment about MBR...
--
Greetings, Peter Passchier

I´m on the search for a bootable USBStick too!
Have a DELL 64MB, tried many howto´s but no chance till now. I´ll give a try to another article I found this morning......will post it later
But to have more capacity a current Kingston Traveller or Sandisk Cruzer is perhaps a good choice. Any (successful) experiences????

I finally got feather to boot on a Cruzer. It wasn't easy, and I couldn't get it to work at all using just Linux to set up the stick.

First, I got the Windoze HP stick formatting utiliity mentioned somewhere here on the forum, along with their DOS bootup files. Format the stick with FAT (definitely NOT FAT32!), and tell it to use the dos files (and it doesn't remember where you keep them; very tedious).

Once this is done, you should be able to boot to a C:> prompt off the stick. If you can't.... well, don't bother with the rest of this. I tried getting syslinux.exe (two or three different versions, including the win32) to work, and *never* succeeded.

Next, boot Feather on CD.

Unfortunately (rob, did you get my note on this?), now you have to dpgk-get and apt-get install mtools under feather because mcopy is needed to run syslinux under feather, and it ain't there (this is all 0.7.1, btw).

If you booted with the stick in, it's probably at /dev/sda1, and might be mounted, so umount it.

Next, just run syslinux /dev/sda1 as root. Whoops! There's a complaint from mtools, so create /root/.mtoolsrc with the line "mtools_skip_check=1" in it. THEN run syslinux.

Reboot, remove the CD, and you should be booting off the stick.

I also did this succesfully with a Lexar jump drive Secure with no problems. I also tried it with a cheap MP3 player/usb stick I had lying around (like an iPod shuffle -- but $35...), and everything worked until it booted -- it loaded the kernel, but I think eventually kernel panic'd when trying to mount root or some such. Tried it a few times. Would be cool to have an MP3 player keychain that booted your whole world (&/or access to it...) on any modern PC -- and fired up xmms for you....

Eric.

Incidentally and further...

I couldn't get any tools to work under Linux. I tried the mbr tool, and it never booted. Didn't try lilo (which I'd prefer if I could get it to work), but syslinux under Linux works once you have a dos-bootable stick.

So why can't I create a dos-bootable stick under Linux? Tried a buncha stuff.

Shouldn't it be a dd of something? Why does mbrtools seem broken?

Eric.

Oops... left out a step:

See italics above.

Eric.

Could you provide a link to the afreomentioned utility and bootup files? I'm in the same boat as you were, except I'm trying with a GE Intelligent Stick 128. It comes with a driver disk that supposedly allows you to make it bootable, but the damn thing is worse than useless (took 3 reinstalls and 2 reboots before it even saw the stick, and refuses to format).

Or to try from a different angle, is there a way to make the stick DOS-bootable without re-formatting it? Looking at the drive properties in Explorer, it says that it's already formatted as a single 124MB FAT partition.

Try this:

http://h18007.www1.hp.com/support/fi...oad/21284.html

There are also some DOS files you need for this utility to make the stick bootable. HP has some, or you can use the files from a DOS boot floppy, or possibly FreeDOS. I use the HP files, which appear to be Windows 98 "DOS" boot files. You should be able to boot the stick to DOS; as I say, if you can't, you won't get further.

The only problem I've had with the HP utility is that sometimes it gets the drive letter wrong for the stick (it chooses, you can't override). So I unplug my other plug-in storage thingy and it works.

Eric.