ISO boot from FAT/NTFS/USB (GRUB.exe, grldr from boot.ini)

Something happened to my last post so here it is again.

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Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman

Why? This would seem to me an extremely straight-forward problem to resolve, and much simpler than fighting with a Knoppix install for months.

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I've contacted the debian guys and received some feedback, and they are telling me that neither the stable version nor the newest beta versions support my laptop, so they are now trying to figure out a work around. I agree with Gilles, that the debian would make sense, but until they can help me figure out that issue, I am going to continue dinking around with Knoppix.

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Originally Posted by Harry Kuhman

It is not at all strange Mike, it is typical. If you didn't expect this then you really didn't read enough before doing a hard disk install.

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Actually, I did read all of your posts and warnings about these types of issues and was for warned. I am not here asking so much for help but rather exchange dialouge with others. I really want to figure this out on my own so I can learn how to use Linux since this is my first exposure to it. I am very impressed that the Knoppix Live CD is as stable as it is and the fact that it is able to detect all the hardware correctly is a testament to Klaus's hard work and the input from many individuals.

Anyways, Since I am here commenting on your post, I might as well update what I am actually working on. For the time being, the network issue is put aside so I can focus on a more interesting issue. My earlier post mentioned that I was able to get the USB working, but what I later discovered, is that it only boots if the internal SATA drive is removed. I found that if I remove the SATA drive, that the USB drive is seen as sda1. If the internal SATA drive is installed, then it is sdb1. The drive already has the funny Dell partitioning on it and Windows XP. The first time I installed onto the USB drive, I had removed the internal drive during boot and all went well. I made the changes per the debian link I posted earlier and it booted ok except for the network issue. As soon as I added the internal SATA drive, I realized I would need to change something. I read on someone elses post about the menu.lst file and I made the changes in this file to show that the USB drive is now sdb1 instead of sda1, but this change was not enough and the boot failed. I gave up on this and decided I would leave the internal SATA drive attached and do another knoppix-installer so that it would configure the files on the USB drive as sdb1 during the install. This caused even more issues. Because of the SATA drive having a funny partitions, some how the boot loader is attempting to read from the SATA drive at sda1 instead of sdb1. This caused the boot loader to fail immediately with an error saying that the file system is not recognized and never even attempted to load the kernel. I went back into the Live CD and changed the menu.lst on the USB drive to it had listed the root as hd1, so I changed this to hd0 and removed the other menu items it had put in it regarding the SATA partitions. After that change, the boot loader was able to recognize that the USB drive is the boot drive and started loading the kernel. Now it is failing at the same point as mentioned in my first post:

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Originally Posted by mbartol

During boot, it says at the very end:
FATAL: Module sd_mod not found.
unmount: devfs: not mounted
mount: unknown filesystem type 'devfs'
unmount: devfs: not mounted
pivot_root: No such file or directory
/sdbin/init: 432: cannot open dev/console: No such file
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

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I should correct my first post because in #5 I said that by installing the Knoppix-CD version that it passed, but later I discovered that I could get it to fail if I had an internal SATA drive installed. Anyways, thanks for your input and if I make any progress or figure out a solution, I'll give an update.

Regards,
Mike

I read this post from Gilles:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...?p=93758#93758

Hmm. I am wondering if using this method requires that the Hard drive is present and loaded with Windows XP in order to boot from the USB drive? It is needed in order to configure/format the USB drive. I will try this method anyways and see. I think this method has a better chance of working than the knoppix-installer.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mbartol

I read this post from Gilles:
http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...?p=93758#93758

Hmm. I am wondering if using this method requires that the Hard drive is present and loaded with Windows XP in order to boot from the USB drive? It is needed in order to configure/format the USB drive. I will try this method anyways and see. I think this method has a better chance of working than the knoppix-installer.

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Hi,
FYI, Only the USB formatting tool HPUSBFW.EXE runs on XP.
I boot computers without hard drives (nor cd, nor floppy) using a USB dongle.
Cheers, Gilles

Gilles,

I have downloaded your latest minirt_usb5.gz in preparation for when the Knoppix 5 is on general release.

I am amazed to find it is nearly 10MB in size.

As previous versions were no more than 3MB is there something wrong here? What accounts for the huge increase in size?

ICPUG

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ICPUG

Gilles,
I have downloaded your latest minirt_usb5.gz in preparation for when the Knoppix 5 is on general release.
I am amazed to find it is nearly 10MB in size.
As previous versions were no more than 3MB is there something wrong here?
What accounts for the huge increase in size?
ICPUG

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No, The minirt_usb5.gz is only 2'688'200 bytes long (2.56MB),
which is very close to the previous ones I have released.
It is actually the same size as the minirt_usb4.gz for Knoppix 4.02.
minirt_usb5.gz (2.56MB) = compressed minirt_usb5 (10MB)
Please do not uncompress it, the minirt_usb5.gz has to be used "as is".

BTW, I am not sure that this boot ramdisk will work with the up coming web release of Knoppix 5.0.
If the linuxrc boot script or the kernel drivers have changed, I will have to make an update as well...
Best Regards,
Gilles

PS: the uncompressed ramdisk I have been using is 10MB versus the 3.41MB from the original Knoppix cd/dvd.
I had to increase the size of the boot ramdisk for development purpose
but it doesn't really matter since the unused space do not take much room after compression.
Actually the size increase may explain some of the problems I have with isolinux... I should have a look at it...
(cf: http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...?p=99669#99669 + previous and following posts)
Thanks.

Well, I ran into a problem trying to use the HPUSBFW.exe and the command prompt version HPUSBF.exe. Since my USB hard drive is 250GB, It is too large for FAT or FAT32, so I am forced to use NTFS. This utility does not allow you to partition. When I format using the NTFS, it completes the format but does not copy any system files to it. I tried manually copying the files in the grubh\root_of_NTSF to the root of USB drive along with the usb_dgle6\boot folder and reboot, but the USB drive says that no ntrldr is found and it halts. So now, I am thinking I will take the hard drive out of the USB box and install it into a PC and do a FAT format with Windows 98 and copy files onto and make it dos bootable and then copy the grubh\root_of_USB to the USB root and the boot folder and install it back in the USB box to see if this works.

I bought a few of these brand new 250GB USB drives for $80.00 on sale, but might be able to borrow a 1GB USB stick since this is the platform that is tested so at least I can follow the procedure given by Gilles.

Mike

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mbartol

Well, I ran into a problem trying to use the HPUSBFW.exe and the command prompt version HPUSBF.exe. Since my USB hard drive is 250GB, It is too large for FAT or FAT32, so I am forced to use NTFS.

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The HPUSBFW.exe is to be used with a usb DONGLE !

This method was not designed to work with hdd, but it may work with "small" hdd ...
BTW, there are other much better ways to install a bootloader on a large hdd
as installing directly grub (from Knoppix) in the mbr of the external usb hdd.

NTFS will not work, since the dos boot require fat16 or fat32 to work, and as far as I know,
msdos will not work with partitions larger than 137GB without having data corruption. (48b lba adressing issue)
BTW, I should use freedos instead of msdos to avoid any data corruption problem.
I will update this asap ...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mbartol

So now, I am thinking I will take the hard drive out of the USB box and install it into a PC and do a FAT format with Windows 98 and copy files onto and make it dos bootable and then copy the grubh\root_of_USB to the USB root and the boot folder and install it back in the USB box to see if this works.

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This will work but you may really consider using a small partition (below 137GB) to avoid data corruption.
Partition magic or freedos/seagate/ibm install cd may also be used to partition your hdd.
You will then need to boot dos (from an other hdd, floppy, cd or usb dongle)
and run fdisk/mbr and the sys.com command to install the system on the hdd.
(just copy of io.sys file will not work since the mbr and boot sector of the disk need to be updated)

Hope this helps,
Gilles

Gilles wrote:

QUOTE

ICPUG wrote:

Gilles,
I have downloaded your latest minirt_usb5.gz in preparation for when the Knoppix 5 is on general release.
I am amazed to find it is nearly 10MB in size.
As previous versions were no more than 3MB is there something wrong here?
What accounts for the huge increase in size?
ICPUG


No, The minirt_usb5.gz is only 2'688'200 bytes long (2.56MB),
which is very close to the previous ones I have released.
It is actually the same size as the minirt_usb4.gz for Knoppix 4.02.
minirt_usb5.gz (2.56MB) = compressed minirt_usb5 (10MB)
Please do not uncompress it, the minirt_usb5.gz has to be used "as is".

UNQUOTE

Sorry Gilles, for wasting your time. Following your reply I did some Googling. Apparently Internet Explorer has a bug which automatically decompresses .gz files without changing the file name! This even happened when I saved the file to disk. This is IE 6 with service pack 2 as well.

I've downloaded your Knoppix500 zip file instead. That works OK!

ICPUG

I was able to get the USB to boot reliably using Gilles method (http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...?p=93758#93758). Thanks Gilles for your effort to put this together, much more reliable than the knoppix-installer method. This method also allows me to boot from USB at sda1 or sdb1 location which is important for me for my tests. I will try to figure out how to install vmware now and have it work after I reboot knoppix. No problem installing and running it, but the reboot seems to be the issue now, probably due to the ramdisk.

It's not clear to me if FAT32 is ok to use for the USB hard drive. I decided to use FAT16 because I thought I read somewhere that it must be FAT16. But FAT16 limits the partition to 2Gbytes which is ok for me now, but may be an issue later on. I am thinking of using knoppix cfdisk now to add an ext2 partition and a linux-swap partition and also an (NTFS partition for the vmware virtual disk). I think this partitioning should not affect the boot partition so long as I don't touch the FAT partition.

I still haven't heard back from Debian why there installer has an issue with my laptop. Maybe, I will use a different PC to install debian onto the USB drive and then see if it will work on the laptop since this issue is probably only an installer issue. Debian uses a later kernel than knoppix and if knoppix has no problem running on the laptop, then debian shouldn't either.

Thanks,
Mike

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mbartol

I was able to get the USB to boot reliably using Gilles method (http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtop...?p=93758#93758). Thanks Gilles for your effort to put this together, much more reliable than the knoppix-installer method. This method also allows me to boot from USB at sda1 or sdb1 location which is important for me for my tests...

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Glad to read that you got it working. Thank you for the feeeback.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by mbartol

...It's not clear to me if FAT32 is ok to use for the USB hard drive. I decided to use FAT16 because I thought I read somewhere that it must be FAT16. But FAT16 limits the partition to 2Gbytes which is ok for me now, but may be an issue later on ... I think this partitioning should not affect the boot partition so long as I don't touch the FAT partition...

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This is correct, FAT16 is limited to 2GB, reason for the FAT32 to exist on larger drives.
FYI, FAT16 is more efficient on a small partition. USB boot should work as well on FAT16 as on FAT32.
Just be carefull when accessing data after the first 137GB of the drive from MS-DOS. FreeDOS is ok.
Cheers,
Gilles