Unetbootin-boot to a hard disk
 

Lately I am using ubuntu live cd's installed on usb's due to I was a little tired of making full installations of windows on our computers and my kids were messing up those installations.

I am using Unetbootin and after the installation I was able to boot and login in the live cd environment.

As I want to use a persistent file, this is what I am doing:
I made two partitions as follows:

750 mb fat32
rest of the 4G usb to a ext3 and labeled as casper-rw

this process is working good so far.

however, when I tried to boot to a Windows installation I always got a black screen.

the process seems pretty simple due to after the installation we can see the option to boot to your hd, however at least for me this did not work as expected.

after a few hours of research I found another related post and I added the following at the end of the syslinux.cfg:

LABEL btl
MENU LABEL Boot to Nearby Next Loader
localboot -1

after this I was able to boot on my hd which by the way, it has a Windows installation.

following you will find the link to the post where I found this information

I hope this will help to others in the same situation.
if anyone of you know another (easy) way to this please share it.

http://reboot.pro/topic/11640-syslin...al-hard-drive/

pd: you can modify or customize you menu login, use your prefered editor and you can either block (uncomment) the rows you don't need, you know enter a # at the beginning of the row, or also you can delete the complete area you don't want.

After this installation I did another try on my laptop and i did not work at the first time. Later i realized that my laptop has two partitions, and Windows is installed on the second partition. what I did I added another same line and it did work.

sample:
LABEL btl
MENU LABEL Boot to Nearby Next Loader
localboot -1
localboot -1


Just as an additional information, the "localboot -1" tells to boot the next device.

However I have a situation that I haven't been able to solved. My other desktop computer has a Foxconn mobo and I have tried different options and still I haven't been able to boot from the usb. What I want to do is the same to boot from the usb into the live environment and from the same usb boot to Windows.

Hopefully someone out there can shed some light on how to solve this situation.
Is my believe that it has to do with how the mobo reads the hard disks, I have disabled everything but the cd and hd booting.

on the mobo I can see the hd as follows:

usb: 1 USB-HDD1
local hd: 2 Ch M. 1

please share your thoughts.

Even though I tried different options, even with Grub and I am not sure if there is problem with my hd mbr or maybe with something else I really do't know, I decided to do a full installation.

however the same way is working on the other 2 computers.