I have a Transcend USB 2.0 256MB thumb drive loaded with Feather Linux .72 which I am trying to boot from a Dell OptiPlex GX270.

The BIOS is A02 07/16/2003.

I am able to successfully boot the feather linux from a custom pc which I built. The mobo is an Asus P4S800D-E deluxe with a SiS 655TX(non-intel).

I believe the problem to be related to the BIOS or hardware of the dell. The dell does sense the thumbdrive which I am able to discern through the BIOS setup screen.

I have modified the dell BIOS to:
-turn off all other hard drives
-reorder boot sequence
Although, neither of these steps are necessary on my custom pc.

There is no other drive to boot from other than the thumb drive loaded with feather linux.

When booted into feather linux on my custom pc, I am able to use every aspect of feather linux, including the saving of the configuration on the thumb drive itself using the 'restore' function at the boot prompt. I am confident that the feather linux is installed correctly on the thumb drive.

Can anyone think of a reason why the feather linux will not boot from the dell?

Thanks,
Hylon

Try using ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/featherlinux/bootusb-1.1.img - some systems will only work with that. If that works, then copy over the minirt24.gz file from the floppy to the USB stick and the USB stick will boot fine.

Hello TyphoonMentat,

Actaully, I did try that from your exchange with the earlier post.

I get the same error, which basically says, 'Failure to boot Press F1 to try again, or F2 to return to setup'

I tried manipulating the BIOS of the dell in a number of ways to no avail. Like I said, turning off all other drives including cdrom.

I friend of mine was able to boot another small distro from a different thumb drive on the same computer called Slax.

Perhaps my next troubleshooting foray will involve installing slax on my thumb drive.

Not sure what that will accomplish since feather does work on my custom buiit pc.

Hylon

I'm not really sure exactly how to troubleshoot your problem then I'm afraid - normally using the other bootdisk fixes similar ones.
Try out SLAX - see how it goes.