USB Disk Booting on Asus A7V880
 

Hi all!

I've recently started to mess around with creating linux distros from scratch, and i have been following the Pocket Linux Howto. After I got my first Floppy distro set up and working, I thought to myself that maybe it would be possible to do this with a USB flash disk. I looked it up on the net, and it appears that you need a bios that supports booting from USB. This is where I started to get a bit stuck.

I had a bit more of a look around, and I could not find anything that says if my motherboard (Asus A7V880) supports USB booting.

I went into my bios, and had a look around for a boot from USB option, but to my dismay, I found none. However, I did find a section on USB devices, and in it was an option called 'forced FDD' which supposedly treats USB storage devices like floppy drives if they are less than 530mb.

So I enabled this, set up my flash disk like my previous attempts with the floppy, and tried to get it to boot. The POST screen on the boot up did say it had detected the disk (Sandisk Cruzer Mini - 128mb), but it certainly didn't boot it and it just went straight to the hard disk.

My question is if anyone has any information on this type of set up, or has ever succeeded with that same motherboard, as this would be an extremely useful feature if it works!

Try using the boot menu (i.e., press [F8] on startup) and then select the flash drive from the list of available devices.

Using the boot menu option on my A7V880, I have no trouble booting a “grub floppy boot disk” image burned to a USB flash drive or Knoppix loaded on a USB flash drive.

Thanks WhatsHisName, worked great! I didn't even know that menu was available till now.

Even with the ASUS bootup logo suppressed and being able to see the “BBS” option, a more descriptive name would have made it a bit more obvious. It’s not described anywhere in the manual.

On more recent ASUS motherboards, it’s called “Boot Menu”, which most of us would understand.

I had made diskless(no hardisk at all) with LINUX system recently & windoze system years ago.

Have a look at my post.
"SLAX under MS DOS"

This technique is used in many rough environment (maybe satelitte), I've peek aound the forum and found very few people understand this.

mine is P4C800 in dual linear mode.
Regards

Before I went to all the effort of setting up pocketlinux on the usb disk, i decided to just do a quicker install of SLAX onto it. It worked, but to make it boot I had to change the way the usb was detected in the BIOS to 'Hard Drive', otherwise it would say 'This is not a valid bootable floppy', or something similar. Unfortunately, when it is set to Hard disk Ubuntu wont pick it up so I have to keep going into the BIOS and changing the settings. Any Ideas why this is happening?

Dunno much about Ubuntu.

I set it to HDD emulation since my solid state media is 2 Gig/200X on size.
(8GB available on market)
I called Slax Server from MS-DOS(maybe Asus Friendly boot OS)in batch process,something like BOOT MANAGER.

This sequence is like my multiple boot LINUX platform(7 LINUX OS in 1 HDD) but not the same.

You can have BOOT manager installed to Boot properly, would you say so?
You'll need greater size media on multi boot OS.

Regards