Booting from a USB CDROM drive, even if your BIOS doesn't support it.

[DrDOS]

Hi DrDOS,

Trying to get PCLOS onto an old Compaq laptop with broken CD Drive & won't boot from USB

I managed to get Puppy Linux loaded via their bootable floppy & USB external CD Drive, but would much prefer PCLOS

I have downloaded your bootable floppy images onto my main Vista PC, can I just copy the pclos_usbboot.img to a flopy disc and then use it to boot & recognize my USB CD with PCLOS live CD inside? or do I need to do it some other way?

Thanks for any help 

Addit: Just tried to copy to floppy, error message, file too big

No, you can't just copy the file, the disk has to be bootable in any case, which a plain formatted floppy is not. It has to be imaged to a disk. You can use a little appy called RaWrite for Windows or Winimage to write the images to disk.

[EdQld]

Thanks DrDOS for your patience & helpful advise to this newbie, saved the day 

Created bootable floppy disc by downloading pclos_usbboot.img per your link and burnt it to a floppy disc using RaWrite (again thanks for this suggestion)

Worked like a charm, booting via floppy disc & Live CD in USB CD Drive 

Did take half a dozen tries to get PClinuxOS to load to the HDD, kept freezing at different points for some reason, but spent too much effort in getting to this stage to give up & got there in the end 

Thanks again for the great program/advice/links DrDOS, Much appreciated 

[Dulwithe]

To make a floppy from one of the image files open a terminal and enter

dd if=folder/filename.img of=/dev/fd0

and the dd (Data Definition) program will write the image from the folder in your home directory on to floppy A:.

Hi Dr.Dos.  I tried to do as per your instructions above, but no luck.  "no medium present" when I try /dev/fd0 or fd1.  I try to mount the floppy drive (it shows up in konqueror), but I get the terrible glass breaking sound.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

D.

UPDATE:  I seem to have got it!  Since my floppy drive is USB, it seems to be /dev/sda, rather than /dev/fd0

[Dulwithe]

Hiya Dr.Dos,

Okay, I got the usb_boot.img file copied successfully to floppy, and booted successfully from it.

However, it doesn't let me boot my 4 year old Toshiba Portege R100 from my brand-spanking new sony USB cd/dvd drive (drx-s70u-r).

Any ideas??  Thanks.

D.

[DrDOS]

Hiya Dr.Dos,

Okay, I got the usb_boot.img file copied successfully to floppy, and booted successfully from it.

However, it doesn't let me boot my 4 year old Toshiba Portege R100 from my brand-spanking new sony USB cd/dvd drive (drx-s70u-r).

Any ideas??  Thanks.

D.

Did you use the pclos_usb_boot.img to do it? Not the plain usb_boot.img. The pclos floppy loads the first kernel and the ramdrive into memory to begin the process of booting pclos. The first kernel has the ability to find and boot from the live CD.

[Dulwithe]

Okay, I got the floppy made with the PCLOS boot.  It will boot and find and report installation of drivers for my sony usb dvd/cd drive, but then nothing.

How am I supposed to get the pclos live cd to boot now??

Thanks.

D.

[DrDOS]

Okay, I got the floppy made with the PCLOS boot.  It will boot and find and report installation of drivers for my sony usb dvd/cd drive, but then nothing.

How am I supposed to get the pclos live cd to boot now??

Thanks.

D.

You just type linux into the command line and hit the Enter key. That will start the linux.bat file which will start the loading process. I thought that info was shown during the boot process?

[Dulwithe]

You just type linux into the command line and hit the Enter key. That will start the linux.bat file which will start the loading process. I thought that info was shown during the boot process?

Aha!  I figured it might be easy like that.  I didn't see the instructions on the boot, but I'll try it tomorrow and see if it works out.

Thanks.

D.

[Uggla]

I've succeeded in making a floppy that will boot a live installation on a fat formatted thumb drive on machines which don't allow booting USB natively. When I get it refined I'll  put up a new post with  it. It is only for pclos and it's derivatives .

Any progress on this? What about PCMCIA cd drives?

[Uggla]

Hi!

I did some googling and found these:

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Fedora/2004-11/1760.html
http://www.plop.at/en/home.html

Has anyone tried them?

[Aaron124us]

My problem is that my CD drive is dead, and BIOS doesn't support USB boot.
I tried using the boot img to boot to my Flash drive that has pclos 2009 on it.
but when it asks me to type in the image source, I have no idea what to put.
Could someone provide me with detailed instructions on how to do this "In Noobe Lingo"?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Aaron

[DrDOS]

Here's a new link for the zipped disks. The problem is finding a host that will keep the files for any length of time.

http://rapidshare.de/files/47816001/Floppies.zip.html

So if you think there is even a smidgen of a chance you need them, get them now. When people stop downloading it the file gets deleted.

[Aaron124us]

Thank You very much. DrDos.
I was able to solve my problem last night using PLoP bootmanager.
FYI PLoP works Great!
It boots to a pleasant Gui interface and all you have to do is select what you want to boot.
In my case I selected USB and it Immediately loaded my Pclos 2009 Live USB just as if I had USB support in my BIOS.
I also tried it with Back Track and it worked.
Here is a link to the site, if anyone needs it
http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagerdl.html

Thanks
Aaron