Thank you Fred Caro, for coming.

Sorry for the delaid reply, it took me some time to do what you suggested.

I made two unsuccessful attempts to connect two old external dvd players. Probably they may be out of order. Both didn't recognise the cds.

As a last resort I took courage and installed Grub. God forbid, everything went smooth. When I hold the shift key, I get the grub menu now. So I conducted the memory-test. Down below on the screen, I got the result "Pass complete. No errors.". Here below is the result;



After this I again tried to boot from USB. But there was no success.

Thank you for your concern, Fred.

Regards

Hello everybody,

If the USB booting issue cannot be resolved; is there any other solution for preventing my PC from going out of my hands, when something goes wrong and I am unable to boot into the current OS due to the lack of a Live USB/CD boot option?

I was thinking of a measure that could save me from such a disaster. But I do not know, whether it is possible?

Though my CD drive and USB are not working, I have a working OS, i.e, LXLE already installed. Can I use this already installed LXLE OS on the HD, to install another small OS like TinyCore-Linux on a new small partition created on the same HD? Is it possible to install another Linux distro from my currently installed Linux OS? If there are two OSs, [One for working and the other a standby, just a small core OS.] on the system and if one fails; in the absence/failure of Live USB/CD boot, the other OS can be helpful in accessing the PC and resolving the issues.

I searched the web. But didn't find any step by step tutorials. I didn't find clear information on whether, even if this is possible or not.

Please kindly inform whether this is possible or not. And if possible, is there any step by step guide to do it? Please provide links that help with the required step by step guidance for doing it.

Thank you all, for the concern.

Regards

Yes it is possible as long as you have another OS such as LXLE which has Grub2. You download the iso of whichever OS you want, whether TinyCore or something else, to your LXLE partition then put an entry to boot the iso in the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file. This works with almost any Ubuntu derivative and a number of other Linux systems. You can get an explanation at the Ubuntu documentation site below.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/ISOBoot

An entry that worked for me is below. You need to make appropriate changes such as the set root line and the loopback loop line which needs to have the "exact" name of the iso pointing to it's path. The example below shows the iso in the / (root) of the filesystem.

Hi Yancek. Thanks for coming.

Oh that's nice. But can I install Grub2 through the Synaptic? I checked but didn't find an entry. There is an entry that says;

Does this install Grub2 on the system?

If not how to install/upgrade Grub2? Is my old system compatible with it? Is there any risk of upsetting the MBR during installation?

Thanks for the link, yancek. I will go through it. And thanks for the sample entry. Such samples help a lot to newbies like me. They greatly reduce the slope of the learning curve. Giving samples, is a great way of teaching. They quickly iron out lot of doubts springing in the minds of amateurs.

Thanks for the concern.

Regards

You said you had LXLE already installed. If that is the case and the LXLE install is recent, then you already have Grub2 and there would be no need to install it again. Use the grub.cfg file in your LXLE /boot/grub directory. Don't update grub. After you have used the entry to boot and install TinyCore or whatever you decide to install, simply delete the entry from the LXLE grub.cfg file and run sudo update-grub from LXLE to get a menuentry for it in the Grub menu.

Mysteriously, yancek, when I had first installed LXLE, neither Grub-legacy nor Grub2 was installed by default. Later I installed Grub-legacy. But to make doubly sure, I checked the version installed on the system by giving the command 'grub-install -v', and the output was,

Thank you for being there, yancek.

Regards

I installed LXLE 14.04 which had Grub2 as the default bootloader so I'm not sure why the version you used did not have Grub2. It wouldn't boot without a bootloader unless you were using a bootloader from some other system. In any case, the method I suggested to boot the iso directly will not work with Grub Legacy for any iso. You would need to first loop mount the iso, then create a directory and copy all the files from the loop mount location then open the isolinux or syslinux.cfg file and copy the modified boot entry to fit Grub Legacy and put that entry in the grub.conf or menu.lst file. Not nearly as simple as using Grub2.

If this system booted once from a usb then about the only way it can't boot again is because usb port is damaged.

I'd do full power down for a few hours with ac (and battery if laptop) removed.

Then insert usb flash or usb hard drive.

Boot directly to bios.

Look in "Hard Drive" order. Move usb drive above internal drive.

Boot choice set to "Hard Drive" Not usb choice.

Boot