Put Pendrivelinux (Mandriva varient) on thumbdrive, and it works with two Dell computers, no problem.

On a third computer, however, the BIOS goes to what appears to be a shell, tells me it can't find the kernel, and then gives me a line that says (without the quotes) "Boot:" and the cursor blinks immediately after the colon. What am I supposed to put there? I have typed in

/dev/sda1/<each listed file in jump drive>

to no avail. What do I put there?

BIOS is not an issue. All three computers support USB booting.

Thanks,

Moxieman

Sounds like a similar problem to the one here:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/archiv.../t-156888.html

I wonder if there's something going on with newer BIOS versions that Dell is using for their machines that are being released with SATA drives. I've actually dealt with this using Fedora 7 and Fedora 8 DVDs and Live CDs on my Dell tower that is just over 2 years old. Everything is SATA inside, but I don't have any problems with any of those discs on IBM towers or my Asus laptop, which are all SATA.

--------------
The Dell computers are no problem (both running Windows, BTW), it's the custom-made computer with the Asus motherboard and running linux as its only operating system that is the problem.

Try entering /dev/sda1/boot at the boot: prompt if your pendrive is /dev/sda1 ...

Just a thought ...

The boot: prompt does not come from your BIOS, but from the boot manager and is requesting direction as to where to find the system kernel which should be located in the /boot directory of your pendrive.

HTH,

------------------------
Thanks. I'll try it (in the next day or so) and report back.

---------------
Well, I tried it, using /dev/sda(1-2-3-4 in turn)/boot and then the /dev/sda(1-2-3-4 in turn)/boot/<each file on thumbdrive in turn) and no go.

Which file in PendriveLinux2008 (Mandriva varient) contains the kernel image or points to it? I thought it was vmlinuz, but that is obviously wrong.